Resumen de The medicine hunter
Barnett interviews Adrian Pohlit, synthetic chemist, about his search for plants that might provide new weapons in the battle against malaria. Pohlit states that in the 1990s malaria cases were increasing in Brazil and the rest of the world. The natural antimalarial, artemisinin, from the sweet wormwood plant (Artemisia annua) offered great hope, but the new generation of drugs was being developed only semi-synthetically: artemisinin had to be isolated from plants, then transformed into derivatives using synthetic reactions. This got him interested in plants as sources of antimalarial compounds. After he got a job in Manaus, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, he began to focus on plants as the best potential source.
