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The Drug Hunters cover art

The Drug Hunters

Written by: Donald R. Kirsch PhD, Ogi Ogas PhD
Narrated by: James Foster
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Publisher's Summary

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 5,000-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.

©2017 Donald R. Kirsch and Ogi Ogas (P)2017 Tantor
Professionals & Academics Medicine & Health Care Industry Science Medical History
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What the critics say

"A lively and sweeping look at the history of drug discovery and how difficult, expensive, and pivotal the search has proven to be." ( Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about The Drug Hunters

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Profile Image for Ahmad Hamdi Alkhatib

Comprehensive and high yield

This book is a comprehensive review of the history of drug development. It is packed full of high yield details and interesting insights about the challenges in the development of all drug classes. It is also easy to follow and enjoyable to listen to.

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  • Rob
  • 2021-06-12

A great read.

This is the second time I have read this book and I must say, gained far more the second time around. It is absolutely excellent and I suspect sometime in the future I will give it a third shot. The narration is excellent except for some rather obvious mispronunciations of various syndromes and medications. However they are not so badly pronounced as to be unrecognizable!

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1 person found this helpful