For patients - and we are all patients at various points in life - drugs have taken on new roles and medical evaluation. In recent years in particular, it has become common for people to take drugs for years, even decades, to reduce risks of disease and to increase the duration. Taking drugs for life has intensified a hybrid longstanding scientific aspects, emotional, political and around the side effects and widespread resentment of companies that benefit from the invention and marketing of drugs

Combined with public health initiatives, new pharmaceuticals have contributed significantly to an improved quality of life and human life aided the increase. Of the United States, for example, life increased from an average of 47 years in 1850 to 78 years today. Advances in medicinal chemistry have marginalized or destroyed health whips once common around the world. This special edition of the news of the chemical and engineering contains 46 essays devoted to drugs or to specific classes of drugs. Among the threads explored is the role of professional chemists in inventing new therapies, the complex interaction of scientists, industry, government regulators, physicians and patients in the laboratory molecules that turn into medical therapies, and professional changing roles of scientists and doctors in the wake of government regulation and the growing activism of the patient.