Pharmacology--a unique discipline for unique questions?

This article discusses the nature and responsibilities of the biomedical subject known as pharmacology. It will attempt to show how pharmacology is a very special subject that is uniquely positioned to ask fundamental questions about drugs, such as how they produce their actions, and how they may be used more effectively in man. Furthermore, pharmacology is a most important subject to the pharmaceutical industry as it is pharmacology, combined with medicinal chemistry and toxicology, that is responsible for the introduction of the vast majority of new drugs. Thus, pharmacologists are to be found in universities, research institutes and industry. In universities, pharmacologists are concerned more with discovering new drug-like entities in the body and natural world and in understanding how current drugs work. In industry, pharmacologists seek new drugs. Over the last decade there have been many discoveries in molecular biology, the new biology. The enthusiasm and revolutionary spirit which greets such discoveries leads to an assumption by some that pharmacology in its present form has been rendered redundant. This article refutes such a conclusion and shows how pharmacology has unique attributes and approaches that are as important now as they always were. Indeed, it argues for improvements in the understanding of pharmacology and how it remains a unique and special subject that should be nurtured.