Patient Empowerment Program: A Rare Disease Podcast
Jul 15, 2026 · 35 min · 12 segments
The final chapter of our Miracles of Science series has arrived! Today’s miracle is an important one: Antisense Technology, perhaps you've heard of it 😉 Every day, our patients benefit from what can…
Stan CrookeHost
And let's step back for just a minute and talk about the drug discovery and development industry because that's where this all fits.
And the health of the modern world is astonishingly dependent on the drug discovery and development industry, much more than it realizes, I think.
So We can very precisely date the birth of the modern drug discovery and development industry to 1900, exactly that year, 1900.
And as it happened, late in the 1800s, there were three scientists working independently in three different countries on three entirely different problems, at least at the surface they look very different, that were attempting to deal with an observation that was common to all three of them.
Curare was a newly discovered substance that was discovered as Europeans explored South America, and the indigenous tribes in South America used curare as a poison on their poisoned darts.
Similarly, Paul Ehrlich in Germany, was trying to explain the activity of arsenicals.
And at that time, syphilis was still an incredible scourge, and there were many arsenicals used to treat syphilis and other diseases.
How do arsenicals work? And then in England, Langley was working on a chemical substance called atropine.
And all of these scientists, almost simultaneously, rather remarkably, encountered this observation.
And As a consequence, they had to come up with a hypothesis to explain that potency.
And Langley suggested, all three of them actually suggested, but we'll focus on Langley, that there had to be something in the body to which his interest, atropine, binds preferentially.
And that's something in the body had to be coupled to something that amplified the effect of this tiny amount of this chemical.
And so it was the birth of the idea of receptors that led to then, of course, a new discipline, pharmacology, and led to the pharmaceutical industry.
And so what is the pharmaceutical industry? Well, it stems from the idea that chemists could synthesize chemicals that could be designed to selectively interact with specific receptors or receptive substances in the body and potentially then result in therapeutic benefit.
And let's step back for just a minute and talk about the drug discovery and development industry because that's where this all fits.
And the health of the modern world is astonishingly dependent on the drug discovery and development industry, much more than it realizes, I think.
So We can very precisely date the birth of the modern drug discovery and development industry to 1900, exactly that year, 1900.
And as it happened, late in the 1800s, there were three scientists working independently in three different countries on three entirely different problems, at least at the surface they look very different, that were attempting to deal with an observation that was common to all three of them.
Curare was a newly discovered substance that was discovered as Europeans explored South America, and the indigenous tribes in South America used curare as a poison on their poisoned darts.
Similarly, Paul Ehrlich in Germany, was trying to explain the activity of arsenicals.
And at that time, syphilis was still an incredible scourge, and there were many arsenicals used to treat syphilis and other diseases.
How do arsenicals work? And then in England, Langley was working on a chemical substance called atropine.
And all of these scientists, almost simultaneously, rather remarkably, encountered this observation.
And As a consequence, they had to come up with a hypothesis to explain that potency.
And Langley suggested, all three of them actually suggested, but we'll focus on Langley, that there had to be something in the body to which his interest, atropine, binds preferentially.
And that's something in the body had to be coupled to something that amplified the effect of this tiny amount of this chemical.
And so it was the birth of the idea of receptors that led to then, of course, a new discipline, pharmacology, and led to the pharmaceutical industry.
And so what is the pharmaceutical industry? Well, it stems from the idea that chemists could synthesize chemicals that could be designed to selectively interact with specific receptors or receptive substances in the body and potentially then result in therapeutic benefit.
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