Didn't you do a talk on YouTube? I recall watching it when you went over the computational requirements of doing something with molecules maybe? I don't work in that field, but remember it being interesting enough to watch the full thing.
It's not uncommon in the tech industry to build some mad scientist solution - pardon the expression - because we're trying to do something pedestrian but have painted ourselves in to a corner, eg HipHop VM.
Doing it to help with cutting edge science is genuinely exciting.
I looked at SBCL, but didn't see good ways to use existing numerical libraries. I'll have to look at Clasp again.