Medicine quest
Subtitle: in search of nature's healing secrets
By: Mark J. Plotkin ; [illustrations by Laurence Richardson].
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
Subjects: Pharmacognosy -- Popular works.
Genres: Popular works.
Description: "Plotkin highlights the ironic marriage of natural products, indigenous wisdom, and biotechnology and details discoveries that are already producing stunning leads in the laboratory: painkillers from the skin of rain forest frogs, anticoagulants from leech saliva, and antitumor agents from snake venom.

Medicine Quest is a historical odyssey as well: Plotkin provides fascinating background on the centuries-old pursuit of cures that ranges from ancient Egyptian expeditions to foreign lands in search of healing plants, to the nineteenth-century development of aspirin; from willow bark that gave birth to the modern pharmaceutical industry, to the extraction of penicillin from fungi that helped determine the outcome of World War II."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [209]-214) and index.