History of Pharmacology: U.S., 1900 to 1945

Pharmacology is one of the cornerstones of the drug discovery process. Pharmacologists test candidate drugs for physiologic activity and then pass the drugs on to medicinal chemists to create the compounds that will later become mass-produced drugs. Though a promising compound may be researched and tested by a number of scientists (such as toxicologists, microbiologists, and clinicians), only a pharmacologist has the ability to document a drug’s therapeutic effect.

Pharmacology is focused on the study of drug action, where a drug can broadly be defined as a natural, endogenous, or manmade molecule that exerts a physiological and/or biochemical effect on the tissue, cell, or organism. To be more specific, it is the study of the interactions that occur between chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical ...