Abstract

It is easy to imagine that the use of medicines, even though primitive, started with the history of human beings. There seems to have been numerous medicines in ancient Egypt [1] thousands of years ago and also in ancient China where there were many kinds of herbal medicines [2,3]. Traces of herbal or medicinal plants, which might have been utilized, were discovered in ancient ruins in various places throughout the world. Similarly, all of the people living in the world with advanced medical and pharmaceutical sciences cannot live without the medicines of today, even though the current medicines are markedly progressed compared with those of the ancient times. In fact, we receive great benefits from a variety of extremely effective drugs. Numerous anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs, for example, have saved many patients suffering from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a virus which has afflicted tens of millions of people cumulatively since early in the 1980’s.