Abstract
THE conception that drugs act by metabolic interference has been latent in pharmacology throughout the growth of chemotherapy and biochemistry. This note traces its development to the status of a working hypothesis. Knowledge in detail sufficient for such a hypothesis scarcely existed before 1900, but earlier writers were aware of some relevant principles. Thus Loew1 attempted to classify poisons according to the nature of their primary interaction with cells ; he assessed the available knowledge of their effects on cell components, including ferments, the nature and independent existence of which were then open to doubt. Other writers, for example, Brunton2, also showed a healthy curiosity concerning the relation of such processes as nutrition and respiration to the action of drugs. Respiration could at that time be recognized not only as a process affecting the whole of an organism, but also its parts, as the hæmoglobin-oxyhsemoglobin change had long been known, and Ehrlich's early work had demonstrated reduction and oxidation of dyes in tissues.
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MCILWAIN, H. BIOCHEMISTRY AND CHEMOTHERAPY. Nature 151, 270–273 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151270a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151270a0
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