"Plotkin highlights the ironic marriage of natural products, indigenous wisdom, and biotechnology and details discoveries that are already producing stunning leads in the laboratory: painkillers from the skin of rain forest frogs, anticoagulants from leech saliva, and antitumor agents from snake venom. Medicine Quest is a historical odyssey as well: Plotkin provides fascinating background on the centuries-old pursuit of cures that ranges from ancient Egyptian expeditions to foreign lands in search of healing plants, to the nineteenth-century development of aspirin; from willow bark that gave birth to the modern pharmaceutical industry, to the extraction of penicillin from fungi that helped determine the outcome of World War II."--BOOK JACKET.