Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine by Thomas Hager

Author:Thomas Hager
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Books
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE

THE GOLDEN AGE

“The newly qualified doctor setting up practice in the 1930s had a dozen or so proven remedies with which to treat the multiplicity of different diseases he encountered every day,” writes medical historian James Le Fanu. “Thirty years later, when the same doctor would have been approaching retirement, those dozen remedies had grown to over two thousand.”

Those thirty years, from roughly the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, marked what drug historians call the “golden age” of pharmaceutical development. These were the years when many of today’s giant drug companies blossomed, hiring battalions of chemists, toxicologists, and pharmacologists, building enormous, cutting-edge laboratories, and employing offices full of marketing experts and patent attorneys. From these fast-growing corporations flowed what seemed to be a never-ending flood of miracle cures: antibiotics, antipsychotics, antihistamines, anticoagulants, anti-epilepsy drugs, anti-cancer drugs, hormones, diuretics, sedatives, painkillers—the possibilities seemed endless.

Thanks to antibiotics and vaccines, medical scientists had conquered many of the infectious diseases that had plagued humanity since the beginning of time and were working on the rest. Thanks to antipsychotics and the new research into neurotransmitters, they had opened entirely new fields of study and approaches to the problem of mental health. Now they were readying themselves to march on the last great killers, heart disease and cancer.

But just then, at the height of their success, drugmakers began to worry. Many of the golden age breakthroughs had come more or less by accident, as when the failed antihistamine drug was used to prevent surgical shock and then unexpectedly led to the antipsychotics, or when a penicillin preservative was found to be a tranquilizer. These lucky breaks—drug historians like to use the word serendipity —led to billions of dollars in income, and in following these leads drug companies had created hundreds of similar drugs, increasing profits. Then the companies plowed much of that profit back into research and development, with the idea that more directed, more informed research could lead to the next great breakthroughs. The lucky breaks of the past would give way to a more rational, more targeted kind of research based not on playing with chemicals and hoping for something good to result, but from a greatly expanded understanding of the body and how things went wrong when diseases happened. Find out what went wrong in the body, identify the processes involved at the molecular level, and then design drugs to fight it. This was going to be the approach that would open the next golden age, one, it seemed in the 1960s, that was just on the horizon.

And yet . . . . there were hints that things might not work out as hoped. Take antibiotics, for instance. All the wonder-working done by antibiotics seemed to be reaching a sort of natural limit. The bacteria that antibiotics worked against were relatively simple creatures. They had only so many places to attack: The cell wall (where penicillin worked), their food processing system (where sulfa drugs worked), and so forth. To make more antibiotics, more points of attack would have to be found.

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