The 2002 Edelstein Award Address to Bond or Not to Bond: Chemical versus Physical Theories of Drug Action*

In 1903, Arthur Cushny, Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics at the University of Michigan, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The Pharmacologic Action of Drugs: Is It Determined by Chemical Structure or by Physical Characters(1)?” To a chemist today, this question might seem odd. The physical properties of a drug and its chemical structure are, after all, intimately related, and even if one wants to distinguish between closely integrated physical and chemical properties, surely both are involved in drug action. Physical properties such as solubility and chemical reactivity due to the presence of certain molecular structures can and do both influence pharmacological effects.