
The Drug Hunters
The Improbable Quest to Discover New Medicines
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Narrated by:
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James Foster
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 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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Great story and superb performance
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Fascinating book!!!
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Very interesting and enlightening
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Well told explanation of issues facing pharma
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Excellent Read (listen)
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Enjoyed it very much
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What did you love best about The Drug Hunters?
Really interesting anecdotes and histories of various remedies. So many of the drugs we take for granted today are the products of lots of perseverance, lots of knowing a good thing when you see it (that can take a long time) and lots and LOTS of luck.Who was your favorite character and why?
N/AWhat does James Foster bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I gave the narration 5 stars because the narrator never got in the way of the text. He was interested, actually knew how to pronounce all of the words, and I never said to myself, "that was an interesting choice on the narrator's part." Which means, as I said, he read it well and lively, but let the text be the main event.If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
"And you thought you already liked drugs!"Any additional comments?
This did just what I think non-fiction audio books are supposed to do. I was entertained and educated at the same time. The stories are about the people who made the breakthroughs, not about the boring (lets face it) chemicals themselves.Fascinating Non-fiction
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Great listen!
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Interesting Subject Matter, Easily Understood
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Amazing book
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