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The Drug Hunters
- The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
- Narrateur(s): James Foster
- Durée: 7 h et 35 min
- Catégories: Biographies et mémoires, Professionnels et universitaires
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The Theory That Would Not Die
- How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
- Auteur(s): Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
- Narrateur(s): Laural Merlington
- Durée: 11 h et 51 min
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Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.
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My Favorites
- A Collection of Short Stories
- Auteur(s): Ben Bova
- Narrateur(s): Ben Bova, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Alex Hyde-White, Autres
- Durée: 9 h et 35 min
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Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike!
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- Auteur(s): Alex Ross
- Narrateur(s): Grover Gardner
- Durée: 23 h et 7 min
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The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
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An essential book for any music listener
- Écrit par mcgr le 2019-03-13
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The First Frontier
- The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America
- Auteur(s): Scott Weidensaul
- Narrateur(s): Paul Boehmer
- Durée: 16 h et 16 min
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Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.
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Discover Magazine's Vital Signs
- True Tales of Medical Mysteries, Obscure Diseases, and Life-Saving Diagnoses
- Auteur(s): Dr. Robert A. Norman
- Narrateur(s): Mark Moseley
- Durée: 7 h et 14 min
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From a case of hysterical paralysis to a pregnancy puncturing a lung, twenty-five of the most thrilling medical mysteries known to man (and doctor)."Vital Signs," a popular column featured in Discover Magazine, has long been a favorite of readers, showcasing, each month, fascinating new tales of strange illnesses and diseases that baffle doctors and elude diagnosis. Each tale is true and borders on the unbelievable. It's no wonder that throughout the years the column has become an unofficial textbook for medical students, interns, doctors, and anyone interested in human illness and staying healthy.
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Anatomy of a Scientific Discovery
- The Race to Find the Body's Own Morphine
- Auteur(s): Jeff Goldberg
- Narrateur(s): Noah Michael Levine
- Durée: 7 h et 8 min
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A true scientific pause-resister that traces a remarkable scientific breakthrough (the isolation of endorphins in the brain) as dedicated scientists race - not only with their fellow scientists - but against time and the profit hungry giant pharmaceutical companies. This audiobook chronicles the fascinating discovery of endorphins, the body's natural painkiller.
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The Theory That Would Not Die
- How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
- Auteur(s): Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
- Narrateur(s): Laural Merlington
- Durée: 11 h et 51 min
- Version intégrale
-
Au global
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Performance
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Histoire
Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.
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My Favorites
- A Collection of Short Stories
- Auteur(s): Ben Bova
- Narrateur(s): Ben Bova, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Alex Hyde-White, Autres
- Durée: 9 h et 35 min
- Version intégrale
-
Au global
-
Performance
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Histoire
Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike!
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The Rest Is Noise
- Listening to the 20th Century
- Auteur(s): Alex Ross
- Narrateur(s): Grover Gardner
- Durée: 23 h et 7 min
- Version intégrale
-
Au global
-
Performance
-
Histoire
The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.
-
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An essential book for any music listener
- Écrit par mcgr le 2019-03-13
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The First Frontier
- The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America
- Auteur(s): Scott Weidensaul
- Narrateur(s): Paul Boehmer
- Durée: 16 h et 16 min
- Version intégrale
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Au global
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Performance
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Histoire
Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.
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Discover Magazine's Vital Signs
- True Tales of Medical Mysteries, Obscure Diseases, and Life-Saving Diagnoses
- Auteur(s): Dr. Robert A. Norman
- Narrateur(s): Mark Moseley
- Durée: 7 h et 14 min
- Version intégrale
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Au global
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Performance
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Histoire
From a case of hysterical paralysis to a pregnancy puncturing a lung, twenty-five of the most thrilling medical mysteries known to man (and doctor)."Vital Signs," a popular column featured in Discover Magazine, has long been a favorite of readers, showcasing, each month, fascinating new tales of strange illnesses and diseases that baffle doctors and elude diagnosis. Each tale is true and borders on the unbelievable. It's no wonder that throughout the years the column has become an unofficial textbook for medical students, interns, doctors, and anyone interested in human illness and staying healthy.
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Anatomy of a Scientific Discovery
- The Race to Find the Body's Own Morphine
- Auteur(s): Jeff Goldberg
- Narrateur(s): Noah Michael Levine
- Durée: 7 h et 8 min
- Version intégrale
-
Au global
-
Performance
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Histoire
A true scientific pause-resister that traces a remarkable scientific breakthrough (the isolation of endorphins in the brain) as dedicated scientists race - not only with their fellow scientists - but against time and the profit hungry giant pharmaceutical companies. This audiobook chronicles the fascinating discovery of endorphins, the body's natural painkiller.
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On Language
- Chomsky's Classic Works 'Language and Responsibility' and 'Reflections on Language'
- Auteur(s): Noam Chomsky, Mitsou Ronat
- Narrateur(s): Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Durée: 14 h et 58 min
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Described by the New York Times as "arguably the most important intellectual alive," Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his highly influential writings on language and politics. Featuring two of Chomsky's most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, On Language contains some of the noted linguist and political critic's most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.
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Happy Accidents
- Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century
- Auteur(s): Morton A. Meyers
- Narrateur(s): Richard Waterhouse
- Durée: 12 h et 37 min
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Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the 20th century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In discussing medical breakthroughs, Dr. Morton Meyers makes a cogent, highly engaging argument for a more creative, rather than purely linear, approach to science. And it may just save our lives!
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How to Hide an Empire
- A History of the Greater United States
- Auteur(s): Daniel Immerwahr
- Narrateur(s): Luis Moreno
- Durée: 17 h et 25 min
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We are familiar with maps that outline all 50 states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire", exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories - the islands, atolls, and archipelagos - this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, author Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light.
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probably one of the top books I've listened to
- Écrit par ali merhi le 2021-01-09
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The Comanche Empire
- Auteur(s): Pekka Hamalainen
- Narrateur(s): Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Durée: 19 h et 51 min
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In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.
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The Wedge
- Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience
- Auteur(s): Scott Carney
- Narrateur(s): Scott Carney
- Durée: 10 h et 1 min
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Thrive or die: That's the rule of evolution. Despite this brutal logic, some species have learned to survive in even the most hostile conditions. Others couldn't - and perished. While incremental genetic adaptations hone the physiology of nearly every creature on this planet, there's another evolutionary force that is just as important: the power of choice. In this explosive investigation into the limits of endurance, journalist Scott Carney discovers how humans can wedge control over automatic physiological responses into the breaking point between stress and biology.
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The Apparitionists
- A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
- Auteur(s): Peter Manseau
- Narrateur(s): Jefferson Mays
- Durée: 9 h et 31 min
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.
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Them
- Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal
- Auteur(s): Ben Sasse
- Narrateur(s): Ben Sasse
- Durée: 9 h et 16 min
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Something is wrong. We all know it. American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair? In Them, bestselling author and U.S. senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger. Local communities are collapsing.
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Enlightening!
- Écrit par Utilisateur anonyme le 2018-10-29
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Free to Make
- How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs, and Our Minds
- Auteur(s): Dale Dougherty, Ariane Conrad - contributor, Tim O'Reilly - foreword
- Narrateur(s): Jeff Machado
- Durée: 10 h et 43 min
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Dale Dougherty, creator of MAKE: magazine and the Maker Faire, provides a guided tour of the international phenomenon known as the Maker Movement, a social revolution that is changing what gets made, how it's made, where it's made, and who makes it. Free to Make is a call to join what Dougherty calls the "renaissance of making", an invitation to see ourselves as creators and shapers of the world around us.
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Sapiens
- A Brief History of Humankind
- Auteur(s): Yuval Harari
- Narrateur(s): Derek Perkins
- Durée: 15 h et 18 min
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In Sapiens, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical - and sometimes devastating - breakthroughs of the cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities.
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I'll definitely listen to this again.
- Écrit par Shea Earl le 2017-11-25
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The Story Behind
- The Extraordinary History Behind Ordinary Objects
- Auteur(s): Emily Prokop
- Narrateur(s): Emily Prokop
- Durée: 4 h et 18 min
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Many of us learn about the major inventions that shape our world. But we too often overlook the objects we use every day. In The Story Behind, Emily Prokop, creator of the Webby Award nominated podcast, explores the who, how, and huh? of everything from Band-Aids to bubble gum; hypnosis to Hula Hoops; and lullabies to lead pipes. Along the way, she demonstrates how the major events of history - from wars, plagues and revolutions to historic achievements and discoveries - have influenced some of the world’s most pervasive inventions.
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Why We Love
- The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
- Auteur(s): Helen Fisher
- Narrateur(s): Marie Hoffman
- Durée: 9 h et 8 min
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Elation, mood swings, sleeplessness, and obsession - these are the tell-tale signs of someone in the throes of romantic passion. In this revealing new book, renowned anthropologist Helen Fisher explains why this experience - which cuts across time, geography, and gender - is a force as powerful as the need for food or sleep.
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Bury the Chains
- Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
- Auteur(s): Adam Hochschild
- Narrateur(s): Derek Perkins
- Durée: 13 h et 45 min
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In early 1787, 12 men - a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery - came together in a London printing shop and began a remarkable grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent. Masterfully stoking public opinion, the movement's leaders pioneered a variety of techniques that have been adopted by citizens' movements ever since, from consumer boycotts to wall posters and lapel buttons to celebrity endorsements.
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Bury the Chains
- Écrit par Norma le 2020-10-27
Description
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.
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- Curmud the prof
- 2017-05-20
Aargh!
As a pharmacologist myself I found the book contained some interesting back stories on the discovery and development of certain drugs. The mechanisms described were simplistic to a fault in some cases. But the pronunciation of many, perhaps most of the drug and chemical names, was awful. For this and similar books we need readers with a background - or extensive tutoring in the field - so that a lay person will hear the big words properly.
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- ilkka
- 2017-07-12
History of modern pharmacology
Very interesting and relevant!
A a physician I use (on my patients) all of the drugs that this book covers. The book also covers pretty much all of the drug families. Should've read this much earlier.
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- Amazon Customer
- 2017-04-23
Absolutely fascinating
I loved this book! It tells the stories of how different medications came to exist - a compelling mix of history, science, politics, and sociology. Good narrator. I highly recommend this book.
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- Barb
- 2017-08-05
Fascinating
A very interesting book for anybody interested in medicine or pharmacy.
It turns out we are lucky a modern medicine can successfully treat so many diseases, since discovering medicines is still and has been, despite all the science advances, a lot of luck and serendipity.
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- Elisabeth Carey
- 2017-10-20
A great look at drug development
Donald Kirsch is a drug hunter--a scientist who works for pharmaceutical companies working to develop new drugs. He's worked for several different companies over the course of his career, and has lived through finding new drugs, having the quest to develop a new drug end in failure, or in the development of something entirely different from what they were after. He's lived through employers not thinking a promising new potential drug was promising enough, and the frustrations of getting drugs through the regulatory approval process.
This started out as a book about why drugs are so expensive. It wound up being about the excitement, tedium, adventure, frustration of drug development. And, oh yes, why it makes the end products so expensive.
Initially, for all practical purposes, all drugs came from plants. This was true in the time of Otzi the Iceman, who was carrying a Neolithic remedy for whipworms when he died. It was true down to quite recent times. when new drugs were developed and old ones, such as aspirin, have been extracted into purer and more powerful forms.
Then came, in modern laboratories, the creation of whole new chemical entities, working to produce chemicals that would attack diseases. The development of drugs from animals is the most recent approach and the hardest to make work, but from it we have, for instance, insulin, enabling diabetics to live much longer, fuller, and more normal lives.
At every stage of this history, developing new drugs has required imagination and risk-taking. Pre-modern hunters after cures for what ailed them and the other members of their communities had no alternative but direct experimentation on themselves and those they knew. Even today, with modern methods, protocols, and precautions, eventually a new drug has to be tested in clinical trials to be sure it is safe and effective in humans, regardless of how well it performed in animal or other forms of pre-clinical testing.
And sometimes, as Kirsch describes in a rather personal experience, the drug hunters still wind up having to test their drugs on themselves, to get to the point where they can even make a convincing pitch to their bosses, who have to approve the funding for further development and testing.
The process of drug development is as much art as science, with intuition and imagination, not to mention risk-taking, playing at least as large a role as rational analysis.
It's a fascinating story, and Kirsch tells it well.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
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- Utilisateur anonyme
- 2017-03-10
Makes me glad I live in the 21st century
This is a great read for others like me who harbor a failed but absurdly optimistic scientist inside him or herself. This book highlights the immense luck involved with discovering and refining seeds of promise to produce true medical breakthroughs.
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- Michael
- 2017-10-29
Way more interesting than you would think!
A fascinating story of what it takes to create new drugs as well as a really interesting history of how some of the most common drugs were discovered. Also helps explain the high cost of medicine without making excuses for the big pharmaceutical companies. It is co authored by a former drug hunter who understands the good and the bad of the process.
Well worth the time!
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- CHET YARBROUGH
- 2017-10-27
THE HEART OF LUCK AND CIRCUMSTANCE
As a science, pharmacology survives in the heart of luck and circumstance. Donald Kirsch and Ogi Ogas recount the origin and history of drug discovery in THE DRUG HUNTERS. Kirsch and Ogas explain how drugs evolved from shamanistic ritual and magic to plant extraction and modern synthetic drug creation. They argue that the complexity of myth, elemental plant extraction, and animal metabolism make the search for effective drugs a casino exercise.
Kirsch and Ogas reveal how scientists, entrepreneurs, and corporations make big bets; garnering wins and losses wrapped in luck and circumstance. Like gamblers, drug hunters lie to themselves about continuing research on busted bets with bigger financial and emotional investments. Sometimes they win but usually they lose--no breakthrough is made. The drug does not work as expected.
The reasons for failure range from false expectation of drug hunters to impure abstraction (or creation) of ingredients. They add to the list of potential failures with mistaken methods of administration (topical, pill-form, or injection), chemical bonding miscalculations, and human versus animal metabolism. The paths to error outnumber the highways to success.
So why do scientists, entrepreneurs, and corporations gamble on research? Because a win can make billions of dollars. Kirsrch and Ogas imply corporations are reducing their research departments and changing their mode of drug discovery by purchasing companies that have found new and effective drugs. A troubling implication is that new drug discoveries will not come from corporations. That leaves new drug discovery to driven independent scientists, entrepreneurs, and government agencies (funded by tax revenue).
Kirsch and Ogas offer fascinating stories of how therapeutic drugs were discovered. From aspirin to penicillin to birth control; to psychiatric treatment, and cancer remediation, they explain how difficult, expensive, and serendipitous the search for effective drugs have been.
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- Gillian
- 2017-10-17
I Wanted To Love This--
Really, I did. Anything that smacks of history? And then you add scientific sleuthing with sociology? It should've been a slam-dunk!
Alas, it needed editing. I realize that it wasn't even 8 hours, but it actually goes on and on here, way too in-depth there. I found my mind wandering.
There's plenty here that should be interesting: biology, genetics, medicinal mishaps causing death, a history of how the Pill came to be and how fraught it all was at the time. And it is indeed interesting to a certain point. I just wish there was more sleuthing involved.
Worth most of the time you'll spend on it, but I'm sorry I used a whole credit on it.
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- Mark
- 2017-12-10
Drugs and how to find them
I found this really interesting. Admittedly, I am ‘in the trade’, working in an Intensive Care Unit and doing some teaching about drugs and their different mechanisms of action, but I’m certainly no pharmacologist.
The book looks at a few major drug groups and gives you the story in each case: Antibiotics, vitamin C to prevent scurvy, beta blockers, insulin, the contraceptive pill, etc. A couple of things come over quite strongly. Firstly, the age in which humanity has used a scientific approach to looking for and designing drugs is very new – we’ve only been doing this for 50-odd years really.
For the vast majority of human history we had no idea about the cause of diseases, and if we ever found a substance to cure or palliate a disease, then this was just by trial and error.
However, even though we are now in a scientific era, there are still unscientific phenomena which play a big part in whether a drug is looked for, found, and then produced. Luck, the determination of individuals, and the profit motive of Big Pharma are three examples.
It is so expensive to bring a drug to market (in the ballpark of a billion dollars), that drug companies need to be assured that they will recover this amount in future sales. For this reason they are less likely to invest in antibiotics, antifungals and antivirals, because these are only taken for a short period. They are much more interested in drugs that are taken for long periods – usually for life. E.g. anti-hypertensives, cholesterol lowering drugs, and drugs to treat depression and schizophrenia.
Although this fact is disappointing, the book doesn’t set out to stick the boot in to Big Pharma. It is more a general overview of how drugs are found or designed, how they work, and the human stories behind them. If this is something that might interest you then I would wholeheartedly recommend the book.
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