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Digital Audiobook
The Drug Hunters by Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., Donald R. Kirsch, Ph.D.

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The Drug Hunters

Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Publish Date
3 January 2017
Run Time
7 hours 36 minutes
Format
Audiobook
$13.95

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What to expect

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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Details

Author
Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., Donald R. Kirsch, Ph.D.
Narrator
James Anderson Foster
Duration
7 hours 36 minutes
Release Date
3 January 2017
ISBN
9781515984689
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Tantor Media, Inc
Genre
Medicine: general issues, Pharmacy / dispensing, Pharmacology, Science: general issues, History of medicine, History of science

Synopsis

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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