The Drug Hunters: The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines

Donald R. Kirsch, Ph.D. · Ogi Ogas, Ph.D.

Jan. 2017 · Tantor Media Inc · Voorgelees deur James Anderson Foster

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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.

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Donald R. Kirsch, PhD, has been a drug hunter for thirty five years, holds twenty-four drug-related patents, has written more than fifty papers, has been a reviewer for prestigious journals, a director, research group leader, and chief science officer at Wyeth, Cyanamid, Squibb, and Cambria Pharmaceuticals.

Ogi Ogas, PhD, is a professional science writer. He is coauthor of A Billion Wicked Thoughts and Shrinks and has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Wired, Glamour, Seed, and Psychology Today. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

James Anderson Foster has narrated audiobooks for a variety of publishers, across nearly all genres-both fiction and nonfiction. In 2015, he was a finalist in three categories for the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Voice Arts Awards (Mystery, Science Fiction, and Fantasy).