The Drug Hunters
The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter.
The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity— by chewing, brewing, and snorting—some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze-age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings. Nowadays, Big Pharma conglomerates spend billions of dollars on state-of the art laboratories staffed by PhDs to discover blockbuster drugs. Yet, despite our best efforts to engineer cures, luck, trial-and-error, risk, and ingenuity are still fundamental to medical discovery.
The Drug Hunters is a colorful, fact-filled narrative history of the search for new medicines from our Neolithic forebears to the professionals of today, and from quinine and aspirin to Viagra, Prozac, and Lipitor. The chapters offer a lively tour of how new drugs are actually found, the discovery strategies, the mistakes, and the rare successes. Dr. Donald R. Kirsch infuses the book with his own expertise and experiences from thirty-five years of drug hunting, whether searching for life-saving molecules in mudflats by Chesapeake Bay or as a chief science officer and research group leader at major pharmaceutical companies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirsch, a veteran drug hunter, takes a lively and sweeping look at the history of drug discovery and how difficult, expensive, and pivotal the search has proven to be. It's an enlightening, if ominous, survey. With the aid of science writer Ogas, Kirsch runs through a bevy of landmark drug finds, including the development of laudanum, an alcohol-based opium preparation, in the 16th century; the isolation of the active chemical in quinine in 1820; the synthesis of pain-blocking ether in 1846; the 1899 creation of the compound aspirin; the 1910 discovery of arsphenamine, a treatment for syphilis; the making of penicillin, the first broad-spectrum antibiotic, in 1940; and the research that led to an oral contraceptive pill in the 1950s. "The soaring cost of developing new drugs creates financial disincentives that prevent pharma companies from focusing on drugs that produce cures," Kirsch writes of today's modern dilemma. Indeed, he notes, on average, getting a new pharmaceutical product approved by the FDA takes about 14 years and costs approximately $1.5 billion. Kirsch sidesteps wider problems in the healthcare industry to conclude that overcoming the obstacles to creating new pharmaceuticals will require granting scientists "creative control over the drug hunting process."
