The life and times of a pharmaceutical drug

One of the chapters in the A level (final year of high school) Salters Chemistry in the UK was drug discovery and clinical trials. The story line book covered this topic in 5 or so pages. What was not mentioned were the actual difficulties and the hurdles that the scientists underwent to discover a new drug. This article published in ‘The New Yorker‘ takes us … Continue reading The life and times of a pharmaceutical drug

The Science of Sleep

Nathaniel Kleitman, known as the “father of modern sleep research,” was born in 1895 in Bessarabia—now Moldova—and spent much of his youth on the run. First, pogroms drove him to Palestine; then the First World War chased him to the United States. At the age of twenty, he landed in New York penniless; by twenty-eight, he’d worked his way through City College and earned a … Continue reading The Science of Sleep