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Asked by anon-192790 to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin on 13 Nov 2018.
Question: What was the hardest part of making medicine?
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Dorothy Hodgkin answered on 13 Nov 2018:
I never actually made any medicine, sorry! Instead much of my research was focused on understanding the shapes of different molecules that are important in health – vitamin B12, the antibiotic penicillin, and the hormone insulin.
Understanding the shapes or structures of these is important in understanding how they work and can be useful for other people who want to make similar types of molecules. For example, you might have heard about the rise of bacteria that are resistant to a lot of our antibiotics. Knowing the structure of penicillin and other naturally occuring antibiotics allows scientists to make new drugs that will work similarly to treat disease. Making those new medicines is difficult and takes a long time and is work that other scientists are still doing.
Similarly my work on the structure of insulin has been used to develop better treatments for diabetes, but I didn’t myself make the medicines.
Comments
Rosalind Franklin commented on :
I worked in a field very similar to Dorothy, and I have the same comment: our work was focused on understanding the structure of molecules that are important to life, and in my case also the structure of viruses. This is not directly making medicines, though it can lead to the development of new treatments.
When experiments lead to the development of an actual medicine, that is something that you can get at a pharmacist’s and take to treat an illness, I think the hardest part is maintaining the quality of the medicine when you are mass-producing it in a factory rather than making 5 mg on a laboratory bench. The manufacturers have to develop production methods that can make tons of the chemical rather than grams, without compromising the quality of the product, and they have to design tests that they can apply to the material before it leaves the factory to ensure that nothing has gone wrong in that production process. This is much harder than making the same chemical under carefully controlled conditions on a laboratory bench – which is what Dorothy and I did.
John Snow commented on :
To make a medicine you need to know what causes the ailment you are trying to treat. This was a huge frustration for me during Victorian times because we didn’t know that bacteria or viruses existed! We relied on epidemiologists like me to make links between exposures and symptoms (like dirty water and a stomach upset). These days scientists have good knowledge of what causes diseases and the challenge for them is to find medicines that are safe for people to take. Many of them look good on paper but cause dangerous side effects. Many of the medicines we take for granted took decades to develop and cost £millions!
Ada Lovelace commented on :
i wasnot directly involvedinmedicine.BUT computing enables us to see connections betweenenvironment and disease more effectively. for example the connection between smoking and lung cancer.
More recently massive computing has enabled us to seethe damage caused by climate change and may sugeest solutions. these solutions may not bepopular!
Ada Lovelace commented on :
didn’tmake medicine, although I might have taken laudanum – now banned – as apain killer
Watching others, perserverance is hardest part – as in all sincence andscience applications
Ada Lovelace commented on :
Logging off now – hope you all enjoyed it
Please vote for me engineering and maths is a great combnation