A restaurant's best dishes tell stories.

Their flavors embed themselves in our memory like song lyrics or lines from a movie.

So much so that a little slice of a restaurant's story can become part of our own. I'm Danny Chow and this is shift meal.

A new video podcast from The Ringer where we're sharing a bite and chopping it up with chefs and restaurant people during their off hours.

Look out for episodes of shift meal on Ringer Food starting September 18th.

Today's episode is about the search for new miracle drugs and the future of medicine.

So a few years ago I was having this off-the-record conversation with a scientist who said

something to me that was so simple and memorable and compelling that I knew in that moment I would eventually

make it into some article or essay or podcast, but I never had the perfect opportunity to recapitulate his

observation until today.

He said the history of medicine has been a kind of journey to the center of the self.

And you can tell the multi-thousand year history of medicine

as a kind of three-part history.

In part one, which stretches back tens of thousands of years until maybe the beginning

of the 20th century, medicine has largely been finding miracle drugs in nature. Almost all of the earliest medicines

were derived from plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, leeches, for better, or worse.

Asperin, for example, was originally derived from a bark, white willow bark.

Quinine comes from a tree.

Morphine is derived from opium poppy.

Penicillin, the first truly effective antibiotic, comes from a mold.

Even the first vaccine in human history against smallpox comes from

cowpox. Hence the name vaccine from the Latin vodkaaca meaning cow.

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