As much as science and protocol?

Does "as much as science and protocol" mean "as much as science and protocol do (for a new discovery, through much trial and error will finally scientists find a way to sucess )"?

Context:

It is never boring to be a physician because patients are so different. Each patient has a story to tell, and few have disorders that match textbook descriptions. By the same token, we need to be careful when predicting the future for our patients, and finding the appropriate therapy is often a matter of trial and error as much as science and protocol. Why are diseases so variable? A study by Girirajan et al.1 in the Journal provides some new insights.
There are three obvious candidates for determining disease manifestation, or phenotype, as geneticists call it. First, the environment has a major role. Disease will not be expressed in persons with lactose or gluten intolerance if they are not exposed to lactose or gluten. Only a small proportion of persons who are homozygous for the common hemochromatosis mutation have overt disease, and the disease is less prevalent in women than in men, perhaps because of menstrual-blood loss, which limits iron accumulation.