[One Thousand Characters a Day] When Life Is Hard, It Is Good to Start Studying <2>

Editor's NoteProfessor Park Chi-wook, author of ＜When Life Is Hard, It’s Good to Start Studying＞, teaches biochemistry and pharmacology at Purdue University in the United States and is also a knowledge influencer with many followers on Twitter. His lectures are well-known for delivering the difficult fields of biochemistry and pharmacology in easy language and interesting examples. During the height of COVID-19 vaccine rumors, his tweet clearly explaining the principle of mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccines in simple terms understandable to the public was retweeted over 10,000 times, helping to alleviate fears about the vaccine. He majored in chemistry at Seoul National University and its graduate school, earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Text length: 1,047 characters.

Poisons produced by plants can also become useful medicines for us. In traditional Korean medicine, it is natural to primarily use medicinal plants as medicine. However, Western medicine is no different. It is said that two-thirds of the drugs currently used in clinical practice are natural products or substances derived from natural products. A significant portion of these natural products are substances extracted from plants or fungi. Many familiar drugs originate from natural products, such as warfarin, which is a modified coumarin; aspirin, made from salicylic acid obtained from willow bark; morphine, a painkiller extracted from the opium poppy; and penicillin, an antibiotic discovered from Penicillium mold. Of course, not all natural products that become medicines are poisons, and not all plant poisons become medicines, but poisons and medicines have a close relationship like two sides of the same coin. Therefore, the field of toxicology, which studies poisons, can actually be considered a subfield of pharmacology, which studies medicines. This is because whether poison or medicine, they are bioactive compounds that enter our bodies and cause certain physiological changes, so their modes of action are very similar. And these bioactive compounds are basically bitter in taste. Our tongues are designed to perceive bitterness to filter out these bioactive compounds that could be poisonous. Thus, the saying "Good medicine tastes bitter" is true, as is "If it’s bitter, spit it out; if it’s sweet, swallow it."

We even willingly seek out and enjoy these bitter-tasting bioactive compounds. Caffeine in coffee and nicotine in tobacco are representative examples. Both substances are toxic compounds that can kill insects. Coffee and tobacco produce these toxic substances to survive by deterring insects from eating them, but humans have come to greatly enjoy the stimulating effects of these bitter substances, especially their arousal effect on the brain. Of course, in excessive amounts, they can kill humans. As mentioned earlier, nicotine is a very potent poison. It’s just that a few cups of coffee or a few cigarettes do not reach a lethal dose, so no one thinks of them as poisons.

- Park Chi-wook, ＜When Life Is Hard, It’s Good to Start Studying＞, Whale Books, 17,500 KRW

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