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Nature's Chemicals
The Natural Products that Shaped Our World
Richard Firn
264 pages
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50 illustrations
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240x168mm
978-0-19-960302-2
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Paperback
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23 December 2010
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- Provides a fascinating insight into the crucial importance of Natural Products to human activities and the global economy throughout recorded history
- Adopts a simple evolutionary theory to form the backbone of the book and provide a theoretical framework to explain the evolution of metabolism
- Clear and simple explanation of biochemical concepts aimed at a general readership
- Tackles applied issues such as pharmaceutical drug discovery and drug design
Natural Products (NPs) is the term used to describe the hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds or substances that are continually produced by living organisms (plants and microbes). Hundreds of millions of tons of these chemicals are generated annually, and the trade in just a few of these has dominated human economic activity for thousands of years. Indeed the current world geopolitical map has been shaped by attempts to control the supply of a few of these compounds. Every day of our lives each human spends time and money trying to procure the NPs of their choice. However, despite their overwhelming influence on human culture, they
remain poorly understood. Yet a knowledge of NPs can help in our search for new drugs, further the debate about GM manipulation, help us address environmental pollution, and enable a better understanding of drug trafficking.
Nature's Chemicals is the first book to describe Natural Products (NPs) in an evolutionary context, distilling the few simple principles that govern the way in which organisms (including humans) have evolved to produce, cope with, or respond to NPs. It neatly synthesizes a widely dispersed literature and provides a general picture of NPs, encompassing evolution, history, ecology, and environmental issues (along with some deeper theory relevant to biochemistry), with the goal of enabling a wider section of the scientific community to fully
appreciate the crucial importance of Natural Products to human culture and future survival.Readership: Alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, aspirin, heroine, anti-oxidants, flavours, pigments and penicillin are just a few obvious examples of NPs, almost all being made by plants or micro-organisms. This book tells their fascinating story with an impressive integration of much widely dispersed information. The approach challenges conventions and cuts across traditional boundaries whilst adopting the old-fashioned virtues of rational argument and historical analysis. There is an overarching consideration of Darwinian evolution and also of the evolution of ideas. Richard Firn's book is thus something of a page-turner and one a
latter day Sherlock Holmes might conceivably have written. |s Annals of Botany |d 2010 students taking related courses in natural product chemistry and biochemistry.
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Richard Firn, Department of Biology, University of York. Deceased May 2010. Richard Firn grew up on a farm near Edinburgh, went 3 miles to university to study agriculture but found chemistry more challenging. Using a scholarship to get to Australia, by chance he began research in plant physiology which he continued in the UK and the USA. In 1973 he joined the Biology Department at the University of York and by a series of chance events he was joined by his first graduate student, Clive Jones, who enjoyed speculating about the evolutionary significance of the many diverse chemicals in plants. Not only did Clive help Richard in the laboratory, he was even called upon to help Richard build the timber house
in which he still lives. Some years later, while Richard was really trying to understand how plants sense and respond to gravity and light, Clive and Richard met up again and came up with the radical idea on which this book is based. Richard Firn died in May 2010.
Contributors:
Obituary by David White
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"Thanks to a liberal supply of historical notes, personal and often sharply critical opinions and an enlivening ability to broaden the context, Richard Firn's book is thus something of a page-turner and one a latter day Sherlock Holmes might conceivably have written." - Annals of Botany
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1: What are Natural Products?
2: The Importance of NPs in Human Affairs
3: The Main Classes of NPs - Only a Few Pathways Lead to the Majority of NPs
4: Are NPs Different from Synthetic Chemicals?
5: Why Do Organisms Make NPs?
6: NPs, Chemicals and the Environment
7: Natural Products and the Pharmaceutical Industry
8: The Chemical Interactions Between Organisms
9: The Evolution of Metabolism
10: The Genetic Modification of NP Pathways - Possible Opportunities and Possible Pitfalls
Notes
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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