Natural Products as Drugs - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 22

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Natural Products
as Drugs
NATURAL CURES FOR ANCIENT DISEASES
In China in 500 B . C ., moldy soybeans—the first antibiotic—were
considered one prescription to cure a rash. Diseases were treated
with products from living organisms hundreds of years before the
development of biotechnology methods that allowed scientists
to move genetic information from one organism to another. A
document from 1550 B . C . in Egypt, perhaps the earliest medical
topic ever found, describes more than 700 drugs, many of them
made from herbs.
Many medicines that we now use and often take for granted
were based on the healing properties of plants and other natural
sources known to traditional healers. Aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid,
is a chemically modified form of salicylic acid, a chemical extracted
in the early 19 th century from willow tree bark, which had been
known for centuries to reduce fevers. Today, aspirin is chemically
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