1. In Quest of tomorrow´s medicines
2. Human Disease

The role of drugs in the practice of medicine

In thinking about the pervasiveness of technology in our lives as the
twentieth century draws to a close, it perhaps does not immediately
occur to us that pharmaceutical products play as integral and
important a role in our civilization as other achievements of ours:
airplanes, automobiles, and other means of transportation, for
example; or radio, television, newspapers - in short, all the means
of communication that accompany us throughout our days.

It is already a commonplace that people respond to minor fluctu-
ations in their health by taking pills - pills for headache and for
toothache; sleeping pills and tranquilizers; pills to lower the
temperature, quiet the cough, and clear the sinuses when one
has a cold; medicines to reduce the appetite; preparations
against diarrhea and constipation, against heartburn, against
nausea. We could continue for many pages with a list of medi-
cines taken for such everyday complaints. In this we would be
describing only one aspect of the use of pharmaceuticals, and a
rather trivial one at that. In the war against serious disease,
medicines are an indispensable weapon in the physician's arsenal.
In this realm medicines save lives, or at least prolong them and
make them more bearable. We shall have much more to say about
the effectiveness of medicines in the course of the book.

Despite the central role that pharmaceuticals play in the current
practice of medicine and, more generally, in our civilization, few
people know where medicines come from or how the pharmaceutical
industry discovers them and develops new products. Furthermore,
most people have only the vaguest notion of the criteria by which the
effectiveness and safety of modern medicines are measured, and
they know almost nothing about the research that has produced our
modern pharmacological treasuretrove. A lack of knowledge about
drugs almost inevitably has led to a lack of understanding of the
societal roles of those institutions that have been the main providers
of medicines during the last century. This book represents an attempt
to redress this deficiency.