Decoding ancient remedies
Copying nature's chemical weapons
Working backward from the disease
The digital drug revolution
007skaty Digitalis Heart Medicine
This wild purple foxglove slows down your beat, turning plant poison to steady your heart.
007skaty People chewed willow bark for thousands of years before nineteenth-century scientists isolated its active chemical, salicin, to produce aspirin.
007skaty Cold water laboratory extraction isolates artemisinin from sweet wormwood to fight malaria.
007skaty Extract active compounds from tree bark to learn how scientists reverse engineer natural cures.
Cinchona bark trade: In the 19th century, smuggling cinchona tree seeds out of South America was punishable by death to protect the quinine monopoly.
An ancient manuscript text in book form. In the twelfth century, European scholars translated the Kitab al-Shifa codex from Arabic into Latin.
007skaty South American cinchona bark provided the first successful treatment for malaria.
What compound in willow bark causes stomach irritation before it is chemically modified into aspirin?
What ancient Chinese medical text from 340 AD helped Tu Youyou isolate artemisinin?
Why did traditional hot-water boiling fail to extract the active artemisinin compound?
What popular carbonated beverage was originally created to make bitter quinine palatable for British soldiers?
What is the scientific name of the foxglove plant from which digitalis is derived?