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    The Drug Hunters: The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
    The Drug Hunters: The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
    The Drug Hunters: The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Drug Hunters: The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines

    Written by Donald R. Kirsch, Ph.D. and Ogi Ogas, Ph.D.

    Narrated by James Anderson Foster

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 3, 2017
    ISBN9781515984689
    The Drug Hunters: The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines

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    Reviews for The Drug Hunters

    4.5/5

    18 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A very interesting book that reads like a drug development version of The Emperor of All Maladies. The authors guide the reader through the serendipitous (rather than ingenious) history of drug discovery. Well written, well narrated, and thoroughly enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Overall great book about a fascinating subject, and well narrated. The only things that bothered me was some inconstitances when it comes to history (right at the beginning the authors uses "ice age" and "neolithic" as synonyms) and more importantly it would have been nice to hear more about certain subjects barely mentionned, like "recreationnal drugs", and a more thorough telling of some historical subjects (for example the chapter abording hygiene doesn't mention Florence Nightingale nor explain the story behind hand sanitizers).
    • 5/5
      Expanded my understanding in this new universe of medicine was a great feeling. Absolutely original interesting stories of common and uncommon drugs told.
    • 4/5
      Donald R. Kirsch is a retired drug hunter and in this readable history he tells many interesting stories of how drugs were discovered. He separates the age of plants from the age of chemistry when it was possible to create drugs. One of the first such creations was the use of a clothing dye that happened to be effective against some diseases. This is why many German drug companies are located on the Rhine river where the dye companies were also founded. There is the story of aspirin, penicillin, heroin (originally a medicinal drug), insulin and "the pill", among others. One gets a sense of how haphazard and lucky finding a new drug is, even to this day. Since we all take drugs at some point, this is a good introduction of how they came to be.