A very interesting podcast about Ancient Egypt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDz45ELiquc
There, Viktor discusses how, over the course of thousands of years, at least two scientific disciplines — astronomy and medicine — systematically evolved in Egypt. And in another segment, the host asks Viktor what he would do if he had a time machine. Viktor answered that he would like to hear how the speech of a king sounded (because we do not know what the speech of the ancient Egyptians sounded like, though we are familiar with their writing).
And it got me thinking. Indeed, given a time machine, what could we bring back from the past that would actually be useful today? Clearly, 100% of Egyptian astronomy is scientifically useless to us now. But it’s a different story with medicine.
The fact is that the discovery of drugs nowadays largely occurs through a trial-and-error method (scientifically called “high-throughput screening” or HTS). HTS is a process of automated testing of a large number of chemical compounds for activity against a specific biological target (often a molecule, frequently a protein). Subsequently, “hits” are analyzed followed by many more tests on organisms, where 99% are filtered out for various reasons, in hopes that this eventually leads to a functioning drug.
In ancient medicine, ethical considerations were simpler, and they tested directly on humans. Let’s take a poisonous mushroom and feed it to the sick in hopes of curing them. If the patient died but, hypothetically, grew hair, then that mushroom should be given, but in half the dosage, to someone who needs hair growth. Oh, he died too. Next time, we give a quarter.
Thus, it’s generally beneficial for modern medicine to look into ancient books.
One notable example is the development of artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug, inspired by an ancient Chinese text. Led by Tu Youyou, the team analyzed about 2000 ancient recipes and from 640 selected prescriptions, they produced 380 extracts tested on animals. In 1971, one of these, artemisinin, was found to have good anti-malarial properties. It was derived from sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), based on a recipe from the third part of Ge Hong’s book “Zhouhou Beiji Fang” (“Emergency Formulae at an Elbow’s Length”), dated to AD 340. Tu Youyou and her team isolated artemisinin from the wormwood, which proved to be very effective against malaria. This discovery earned Tu Youyou the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.
And about Egypt, do watch. Viktor Solkin is very knowledgeable.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 