Early Humans Discover Drugs

The use of chemicals (drugs) for both medical and recreational purposes is hardly new. In fact, drug use seems to have been a part 

Over the centuries, people developed by such methods a list of medicinal and recreational drugs that made up the earliest informal pharmacopoeia, a catalog of drugs, chemicals, and medicinal preparations. Chemicals that worked (that brought relief, cured, or altered a mental state) made that list. Those that did not (killed people or caused serious harm) usually did not. 

Indeed, most of the progress in the development of recreational drugs has been in the search for compounds that are only modest chemical variations of centuries-old drugs. The invention of entirely new mind-altering drugs (such as lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD) has been relatively uncommon. 

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The following are some snapshot examples of how drugs were discovered from the early human civilizations. 

Camptothecin was discovered as an active anticancer drug isolated from the bark of Camptotheca acuminata. The anticancer activity of camptothecin was discovered in the 1960s by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) as part of a systematic effort to screen for novel anticancer agents derived from natural products. Monroe Wall and Mansuhk Wani identified the chemical structure of camptothecin. They also identified the chemical structure of taxol, again under the auspices of the NCI. Susan Hoiwitz was contracted by the NCI to elucidate the anticancer mechanisms of camptothecin. She found in the early 1970s that camptothecin induced DNA breaks and attested DNA and RNA synthesis. However, it is approximately 12 years later, only after DNA topo-isomerase I (Topi) had been identified in human cells, that Leroy Liu and his coworkers found that Topi was the cellular target of camptothecin [reviewed in [1]. 

Mechlorethamine (nitrogen mustard Mustargen), a derivative of the war gas sulfur mustard, is considered to be the first modern anticancer drug. In the early 1940s it was discovered to be effective in the treatment of human lymphomas. 

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