A question (of the nice variety) that students sometimes ask is about the relevance of natural products. The answer is a yes-and-no answer. I like to add to the usual arguments, an evolutionary take, which is two sided. A lot of secondary metabolites made by plants have been evolved to kill you (a mostly herbivore), but your liver has been evolved to be good at destroying them. For drug discovery, this has two opposite effects: the pro is a long list of antibacterial, antifungal and anticancer compounds to use or to adapt, the con is their ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) properties have frustrated medchemists for decades and decades. Herein, the two faces of this coin are explored not by advocating for or against natural products, but exploring what they mean for medicinal chemistry.
