Gates Package — page 1000

of *** Treating disease is nothing new to humans. The practice of using roots, herbs, and other natural ingredients as healing agents dates to ancient times. Some 9,000 years ago, Stone Age dentists in modern-day Pakistan drilled into their patients' teeth with pieces of flint.12 The ancient Egyptian physician and scientist Imhotep catalogued treatments for 200 diseases around 5,000 years ago, and the Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed a form of aspirin--extracted from the bark of the willow tree--more than 2,000 years ago.13 But it's only in the past couple of centuries that we've been able to synthesize medicines in the lab rather than by extracting them from things we found in nature. One of the earliest synthesized drugs came about in the 1830s, when several scientists and physicians working independently all managed to make chloroform, the powerful anesthetic and sedative that, among other uses, would help Queen Victoria through the pain of childbirth. Sometimes a drug has been invented because some enterprising scientist set out to do it, but sometimes it happens by pure accident, as in 1886, when two young chemistry students at the University of Strasbourg stumbled on a solution to a problem they weren't even looking to solve. 14 Their professor was investigating whether a substance called naphthalene--a by-product of making tar--could be used to cure intestinal worms in humans. They administered the naphthalene with surprising results: It didn't get rid of the worms, but it did break the person's fever. After further investigation to figure out what had happened, they realized that they hadn't used naphthalene at all, but rather a then-obscure drug called acetanilide, which the pharmacist had handed them by mistake. Soon, acetanilide was on the market as a cure for fevers and as a pain reliever, but doctors found that it had an unfortunate side effect: It made some patients' skin turn blue. After