Saturday, August 28, 2010

medicines from nature - Why bother?

I found this an elegant explanation about why we can find things in nature that are hard to discover in the laboratory:

Toxins that have already been designed in nature have the unusual combination of precise specificity and extreme potency – characteristics that make them particularly amenable to use as leads in drug design.
— Dr Brian Fry, Bio 21 Institute

I'd always wonder why you can't just sit in a lab and make drugs. Why it was worth discovering them in nature whether in the middle of the Amazon rain-forest or in the Antarctic ocean.

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