Preparation of Compounds of Potential Physiological Activity: Amino and Thio Esters of Substituted Benzilic and Glycolic Acids and Related Compounds

Interest in medicinal chemistry has been high during the last two decades all over the world, and particularly in the United States. It has been stimulated by improved methods of clinical diagnosis and the ensuing demands for new corrective and curative agents, by the need for better medicinals in the treatment of the growing number of aged individuals, by the urgency of wartime search for anti-infectious drugs, by the greater significance of pharmaceutical theories, and by the unpredicated expansion of the American pharmaceutical industry. The proof of the structure of most vitamins and of many internally secreted products and the beginning of an appreciation of their biochemical mechanism of action have contributed to the rapid development of this field. There is barely a meeting of learned societies in the chemical, biological, or medical sciences at which some theories and facts about drugs are not discussed in numerous papers and symposia. More and more young scientists are turning to the manufacturing, testing, and theoretical study of medicinals as a productive and intellectually rewarding occupation. The medicinal chemist is generally a member of a research team which usually consists of himself, a pharmacologist who tests his drugs, physicians who transpose animal experiments into clinical trials, and a chemical engineer who manufactures the tested and proved drug for general therapeutic use. The great results of recent medicinal chemistry have all been obtained by research teams, and not by individual scientists.