Читать книгу Don't Fall For It - Carlson Ben, Ben Carlson - Страница 6

It’s not a lie if you believe it.

—George Costanza

In the late 1980s a group of chemists from Pfizer created a compound called sildenafil citrate. It was developed to fight cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and chest pain. The project was called UK92480 (the UK is because the chemists were based in the United Kingdom) – but even though it sounds top secret, it ended up being a low drug on the totem pole because of disappointing test results. No one involved with the effort thought they were onto something groundbreaking at the time.^[1]

In fact, in the summer of 1993, the group was given an ultimatum that unless they could come back in the fall with conclusive data, it was time to close up shop and move on. Just a few short days later the researchers were doing a study on a group of miners in South Wales. Per protocol, they asked the miners if they noticed anything different after taking the drug. One of the men spoke up and said, “Well, I seemed to have more erections during the night than normal.” The other men grinned and nodded in agreement.^[2] One of the nurses in another clinical trial around the same time also noticed many of the men were lying on their stomachs, embarrassed that they ended up with an erection after taking the drug. A drug that was meant to treat cardiovascular disease was having very surprising unintended consequences.^[3]

One of the main causes of chest pain is a condition called angina, which has to do with a reduced flow of blood to the heart. The reason this chest pain occurs is because the vessels that supply your heart with blood become constricted, which leads to pain in your chest as well as shortness of breath. Scientists often know how certain compounds are supposed to work but they don’t always know if they will have the intended effect on the intended area of the body. The idea behind sildenafil was that it would dilate the blood vessels in the heart, thus reducing chest pain and breathlessness. Instead, the blood vessels in the penis became dilated. This drug inhibited the enzyme that breaks down a chemical that is key to the biology behind an erection.^[4]

This isn’t the first time a drug was discovered by accident. After vacationing in Scotland for a month in 1928, a pathologist named Andrew Fleming returned to his laboratory to discover he had left a petri dish on a windowsill at a hospital in London. Fleming was growing bacteria in these dishes but noticed the one he accidentally left out had grown an airborne fungus. The fungus stopped the bacteria dead in its tracks. This mold was called Penicillium notatum. Fleming inadvertently made one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine. He created the antibiotic penicillin.^[5]

It can’t be overstated how huge this discovery was. At the time, the average life span in the United States was under 60 years of age. That number is now around 80 years old, and Fleming’s accidental discovery had a lot to do with this. Fleming would later say, “When I woke up just after dawn on 28 September, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.” ^[6]

A failed cardiovascular drug that gave men erections didn’t have quite the same impact as penicillin, but these scientists did stumble across one of the most successful drugs of the modern era. Today we know of this drug as Viagra. According to Pfizer, since it was officially launched in 1998, 62 million men from around the globe have purchased the erectile dysfunction drug. It’s estimated that people in the US alone spend almost $1.5 billion on Viagra each year. Even the US military is said to spend almost $42 million on the little blue pill.^[7]

A few months after the drug was released, there were over 300,000 prescriptions filled in a single week. Obviously, there was a ton of pent-up demand for this product. Before Viagra’s approval by the FDA in 1998, there really was no treatment for erectile dysfunction. The only options available included a painful injection or an implant, not exactly as easy as popping a little blue pill in your mouth. And before even penicillin was discovered, men went to far greater lengths to cure their libido.^[8]