Includes bibliographical references and index.

Concise history of drug discovery -- A concise historical background of the first botanical garden in North America -- Tidbits on modern discoveries and inventions -- Discoveries and inventors -- Brazilian indigenous phytodrugs -- Hypnotic drugs -- Talking about chinese medicine's "reinforcing and eliminating" -- Pride of the peruvian empire -- La Ciencia y El curativa de los mayas desde eras incomputables -- Coconut oil: a great drug discovery -- Mayas of yacatan (between imperial theology and "scientific" racism) -- Chemistry: the science of molecules and its application to drugs -- How do medicinal chemists design or discover medicines? -- Drug preparations and pharmaceutical chemistry -- Modern instrumentation in drug discovery -- Modern drug discovery: birth of a drug -- Tales if shamanism in drug discovery -- Chemoinformatics: applications to drug discovery -- Prediction of H NMR coupling constant with associative neural networks trained for chemical shifts -- Chemoinformatics approaches for manipulation for structural information -- Data mining in drug discovery -- Data mining process: a case study of protein signal transduction from Axcell biosciences -- Database approaches in big pharmas.