how do people figure out which medicines worked?

Question

Do they just put random chemicals in people and see what happens?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Random plants. So perhaps eating poppies was good for headaches, or willow bark. Then we figured out which specific chemical in those plants was doing the trick (opium and aspirin) and refined them out.

Or perhaps we figure out that a toxic creature kills by causing endless bleeding and that gives us a blood thinner.

Now we have enough computing power to design a custom molecule from scratch with confidence of it’s effects.