AI ethics on Monday, 2 March 2026

Natural products (NPs) have long served as a cornerstone of drug discovery, yielding landmark therapeutics such as paclitaxel and artemisinin and providing sustained access to biologically relevant chemical space. Despite this legacy, NP-based discovery has gradually declined with the rise of synthetic chemistry and high-throughput screening, even as many contemporary "synthetic" drugs remain structurally inspired by natural scaffolds. Classical NP workflows-centered on phenotypic screening and