Something New at the Apothecary Shop:
Synthetic Drugs

Monument to ether in Boston.

There was a time when all our painrelievers and other drugs came from natural sources like plants and animals. But around 1800, scientists began to putter around in their laboratories and make new drugs. At first all they did was re-create natural drugs. This was useful when plant and animal sources are too hard to use or don't produce enough of the medicine.

Once we figured out how to duplicate nature, we began to tweak the molecules we found in the natural world. Sometimes a plant would give us a medicine that had unpleasant side effects. So scientists would alter the molecular structure of the natural molecule until they had made a drug that worked like the natural drug, but without the side effects. Aspirin was one of the first nature-inspired synthetic drugs.

The diethylether molecule.

The next step was to create painkillers from molecules unlike any found in nature. This was an important step in our battle with one kind of pain in particular, the pain of surgery. One of the first completely synthetic compounds created was a little molecule called diethylether, called ether for short. It wasn't made to be a drug, but in the 1800s, several different people found that breathing ether made people insensitive to pain. So in the mid-1800s doctors began using ether as an anesthetic, that is to put patients to sleep during surgery. (Ether knocked out the patient as well as knocking out pain.) Before that invention, surgery was a painful ordeal, and operating rooms were full of the screams of patients. But the pain of surgery was soothed thanks to ether.

The last step was to design new molecules from scratch. In modern times, scientists have learned more about how your body works. This means we can design and build new molecules specifically to stop pain or treat other illnesses.

Today many painkillers are synthetic drugs, including acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen sodium, and ketoprofen.

For more information, at other Web sites...

"We have conquered pain." — A Celebration of Ether 1846-1996 — a site exploring the history of anesthesia from Massachusetts General Hospital.