Quotes & Sayings About Medicinal Chemistry

In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology. — James Black

I did help to set up an undergraduate course in medicinal chemistry and made progress in modelling and analysing pharmacological activity at the tissue level, my new passion. — James W. Black

English philosopher Bertrand Russell, another prominent twentieth-century pacifist, once used those medicinal facts about iodine to build a case against the existence of immortal souls. "The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin ... ," he wrote. "For instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure." In other words, iodine made Russell realize that reason and emotions and memories depend on material conditions in the brain. He saw no way to separate the "soul" from the body, and concluded that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through. — Sam Kean