The Drug Hunters
The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines

This fun little book covered the creation of new drugs from early healers who engaged in a largely hit or miss process that sometime landed them on a plant that helped cure an ailment to the later healers who extracted specific chemicals from plants that were more potent healers. One of the most int......more

This book is one big bookmark. One amazing fact/anecdote after another. It's almost hilarious. When it comes to finding out new drugs, it's ideal if you're competent and lucky. But if you have to chose, luck is the way to go. The randomness of some findings is just mind blowing. The resistance of what......more

The lovely man I married forty-five years ago is now entirely dependent on the drugs he takes every two hours that allow him to move. Since his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis nearly twenty-seven years ago, few new drugs have come to market and most of them have been reformulations or combinations of......more

If you've ever wanted to learn the history of your favorite pharmaceutical drug, this is the book for you. Donald Kirsch is a "drug hunter," meaning that he's one of the few people who gets funding from a big pharmaceutical company to try and test out cures for what ails you. The likelihood of that......more