---
title: 'Book review: The Drug Hunters'
date: 2026-03-11T12:00Z
tags:
    - book
    - drug discovery
has_math: false
---

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<p>

This is a re-post from my <a
href="https://github.com/AustinT/book-summaries/blob/master/non-fiction/2026-03-11-drug-hunters.md">book
summaries repo</a>, which is my main home for book summaries. I'm posting here
because this book is more work-relevant than usual.

</p>

</div>


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**Authors:** Donald Kirsch and Ogi Ogas

**Link:** <https://www.amazon.com/Drug-Hunters-Improbable-Discover-Medicines-ebook/dp/B01HDVCRY0/>

This book is the authors' attempt to explain what the job of "drug hunter" is,
specifically to explain how hard it is (partly to counter the "pharma is evil"
narrative). The book takes a historical perspective, roughly covering different
"eras" of drug hunting where the "hunting" was done in different places.

Note first the term "hunter": this is different than "inventor" or "designer".
This word choice is (at least partially) intentional. For most of human
history, there was no notion that new drugs could be _created_, just found in
nature. And, the vast majority of drugs ever created were "found" rather than
"designed": either a substance produced by plant/animal/fungus/etc was found
and found to have a certain therapeutic effect, or somebody was testing
artificial substances to see what happened and happened to find a therapeutic
effect.

The basic eras of drug hunting were:

- Plant era: in ancient times basically all drugs came from plants and were
  discovered by trial and error. Plants secrete all sorts of substances and
  people naturally try eating different plants, so randomly discovering
  therapeutic properties is not too surprising. People had no really
  understanding of _why_ anything worked though. Example drug: quinine
  (anti-malarial drug extracted from the bark of a tree).
- Alchemy/chemical era: trying new chemicals synthesized by alchemists, again
  with no idea why anything worked. Example drug: ether (an anesthetic).
- Synthetic chemistry era: people use new chemical synthesis methods to
  _improve_ on natural drugs. Example drug: aspirin (modified version of
  salicylic acid, where the modification of adding an acetyl group reduced
  unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects while preserving pharmacological
  activity).
- "Magic bullet" era: drugs were designed to achieve a specific effect in the
  body (eg killing a microorganism). The pre-requisite for this era was having
  some understanding of what actually caused disease (mostly germs), otherwise
  obviously nothing can be intentionally designed. Paul Ehrlich was studying
  dyes and had the idea of a "magic bullet", a chemical that just targets and
  kills the pathogen (something he suspected might be possible because there
  were microscopy dyes that only stained pathogens and not animal cells).
  Example drug: arsphenamine (aka salvarsan), a drug against syphilis.
- "Regulation" era: not an era of discovery per se, but in the 1930s-40s
  governments (particularly the US government) started to regulate drugs to
  ensure they were safe. This obviously improved safety but made development
  and testing more costly. Notable drug disaster: Elixir Sulfanilamide, which
  was a drug mixed with toxic diethylene glycol (intended to give it a sweet
  flavor).
- "Science" era: for most of history pharmacy was a "pre-scientific field",
  basically just a list of effects without any organizing principles or clear
  conceptual frameworks. Gilman and Goodman wrote an influential textbook that
  tried to describe all known drugs scientifically, forming the basis for
  pharmacy to be a more scientific field (like it is now).
- "Microbe" era: starting with penicillin, scientists screened compounds from
  microscopic organisms (bacteria and fungi). Example drugs: penicillin and
  streptomycin. The chapter ends with a commentary of how antibiotic discovery
  is not commercially attractive to big pharma, which is a huge shame.
- "Animal" era: medicines from animals, like hormones and antibodies. Example
  drug: insulin.
- "Epidemiological" era: using insights from epidemiology to understand causes
  of disease, and therefore how one might treat it. The chapter (chapter 10)
  discusses cholera and John Snow, although no drug was invented for Cholera at
  this time. Example drugs: Diuril and Captopril as anti-hypertensive agents.
  They were known to lower blood pressure, but this was only linked to
  cardiovascular health by the "Framingham Heart Study" which overturned
  medical opinion that hypertension was good.

(**NOTE**: these eras are not sequential, some of them overlap, especially the
later ones)

In the end there are 2 chapters which don't really fit into any of these eras:
the story of how the birth control pill was invented and a collection of
stories about drug discovery where luck played a huge part.

Overall I'd highly recommend the book. The anecdotes are great, and it provides
great context for the past of drug discovery, which was mostly about
"screening" and "luck". It implies that the current efforts from companies like
Recursion to do drug _design_ are 1) historically anomalous 2) very very
difficult. I don't think we should be deterred, just aware of the past. Overall
I'd highly recommend this book to anybody in pharma / drug discovery / AI for
drug discovery.