Natural Products as Drugs - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 23

synthesized from simple starting chemicals, a process that costs
less than growing willow trees. We can thank both the willow
plant and advances in chemistry for the availability and low cost
of aspirin.
FROM DYES TO DRUGS
The modern pharmaceutical industry began in Europe when
researchers developed methods to isolate and determine the struc-
ture of complex chemicals from natural sources, and to build these
compounds from inexpensive and readily available starting materi-
als. Soon, industrial chemists were isolating many useful chemicals
from coal tar, a by-product of the industrial use of coal for fuel, and
developing methods to make many new products, including textile
dyes, from scratch.
Stop and Consider
Does describing a drug as “natural” mean it is safe to use? Provide
some examples.
Traditionally, textile dyes were extracted from plants, requiring
access to scarce, often exotic, raw materials. The development of
methods to make chemicals inexpensively from cheap raw materi-
als spawned several entirely new industries, including the phar-
maceutical industry. Advances in chemical dye methods were
quickly applied to medicine, beginning in the early 19 th century,
when chemists isolated the drugs morphine , quinine , and digitalis
from their plant sources: poppies, cinchona tree bark, and the
foxglove plant, respectively (Figure 2.1). Today, chemists use
sophisticated and powerful tools, but the basic principle is often
the same. Working from knowledge of the medicinal properties of
a particular plant or microorganism (a living thing too small to
be seen without a microscope), chemists isolate an active drug,