page_title: Human uses of living things
section_title: For medicines and drugs
hierarchical_section_title: Human uses of living things / Practical uses / For medicines and drugs
caption_attribution_description: Mandrake (gr. ΜΑΝΔΡΑΓΟΡΑ, in capital letters). Folio 90 from the Naples Dioscurides, a 7th century manuscript of Dioscurides De Materia Medica (Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, Cod. Gr. 1).
context_page_description: Human uses of living things, including animals plants, fungi, and microbes, take many forms, both practical, such as the production of food and clothing, and symbolic, as in art, mythology, and religion. The skills and practices involved are transmitted by human culture through social learning.
  Plants provide the greater part of the food for people and their domestic animals: much of human culture and civilisation came into being through agriculture. While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the power used for work and transport. A variety of living things serve as models in biological research, such as in genetics, and in drug testing. Until the 19th century, plants yielded most of the medicinal drugs in common use, as described in the 1st century by Dioscorides. Plants are the source of many psychoactive drugs, some such as coca known to have been used for thousands of years.
context_section_description: Vaccines have been made using animals since their discovery by Edward Jenner in the 18th century. He noted that inoculation with live cowpox afforded protection against the more dangerous smallpox. In the 19th century, Louis Pasteur developed an attenuated (weakened) vaccine for rabies. In the 20th century, vaccines for the viral diseases mumps and polio were developed using animal cells grown in vitro.
  An increasing variety of medicinal drugs are based on toxins and other molecules of animal origin. The cancer drug Yondelis was isolated from the tunicate Ecteinascidia turbinata. One of dozens of toxins made by the deadly cone snail Conus geographus is used as Prialt in pain relief.
  Since classical times and possibly much earlier, hundreds of species of plants have provided drugs to treat a wide range of conditions. Dioscorides's De Materia Medica, written by 70 AD, listed some 600 medicinal plants and around 1000 drugs made from them, including substances known to be effective such as aconite, aloes, colocynth, colchicum, henbane, opium and squill. The book remained a standard reference for nearly two thousand years, and was the basis of the European pharmacopoeia until the end of the 19th century.
  Also since the earliest times, people have exploited some of the many psychoactive substances manufactured by plants in religious rituals and for pleasure.  Among the most widely used throughout history are alcohol, produced by fermenting cereals with yeast (a fungus), tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate, cannabis, coca (used as leaf for some 8,000 years in Peru,
  and in recent times also purified to cocaine), mescaline (from a cactus) and psilocybin (from a fungus).
caption: Mandrake in Dioscorides's De Materia Medica, one of hundreds of medicinal plants used since classical antiquity
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