The Drug Hunters by Donald R Kirsch
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. Otzi 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 of drug hunters from the US, UK, Germany, and other nations. 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.
Ogi Ogas studies computational models of memory, learning, and vision. He was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow.
Sai Gaddam studies large-scale data analysis and serves as a data mining consultant in India. They both received their Ph.D.s in computational neuroscience from Boston University.
Sai Gaddam studies large-scale data analysis and serves as a data mining consultant in India. They both received their Ph.D.s in computational neuroscience from Boston University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781628729863 |
| ISBN 10 | 1628729864 |
| Title | The Drug Hunters |
| Author | Donald R Kirsch |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Arcade Publishing |
| Year published | 2018-11-01 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |