What's the difference between a synthetic drug and an antibiotic?
Sometimes there's no difference at all. Let's take a look at chloramphenicol and couple of pencillins.
Chloramphenicol kills many different kinds of bacteria by interfering with their ability to make new proteins. Here's a point where language gets tricky. Originally, chloramphenicol was isolated and purified from Streptomyces (a kind of bacteria). But, chloramphenicol is small and chemists are able to synthesize it. So even though we consider antibiotics to be natural products, they don't ... Read more
