In writing this perspective, we do not mean to imply that radical retrosynthetic approaches will solve all problems encountered in medicinal chemistry. To be sure, canonical polar approaches will likely always remain as powerful means to construct key carbon-carbon linkages in compounds of interest. That is partly because they have benefitted from nearly a century of refinement. Indeed, in recent surveys of reaction types most used in pharmaceutical chemistry, radical reactions are nowhere to be found. This may be due to the long-held notion that radical chemistry is difficult to tame and best employed in intramolecular settings or for simple deoxygenations. However, as complexity demands in modern medicinal chemistry increase, combined with shrinking timelines needed to go from hit to lead, there is a real need for methods that depart from convention and classic dogma. Radical cross-coupling represents such an approach and is still in its infancy. Its use often overcomes the need for monotonous functional group manipulations and allows the direct coupling of easily accessible starting materials. The convergency, modularity, and rapid build-up of complexity they facilitate can therefore have a tangible impact on the medicinal chemist's ability to not only accelerate but even enable access to high value scaffolds. In reflecting on the cutting-edge nature of amide-bond formation in the 1950's and its status today as perhaps the most used reaction of our time, one wonders if radical cross-coupling methods in 2050 will be viewed as commonplace and, perhaps, even boring.