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Information about Panacea (medicine)

The panacea (IPA [pænəˈsiə]), named after the Greek goddess of healing, Panacea, was supposed to be a remedy that would cure all diseases and prolong life indefinitely. It was sought by the alchemists as a connection to the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone, a mythical substance which would enable the transmutation of common metals into gold.

Compare: patent medicine, snake oil

Medical science, in some sense, continues to look for a "panacea" and an "elixir of life" of sorts. The current focus may be on the immune system along with the role of genes and interplay of heredity and environment - but the desires to "cure all", to "retard the aging process", and to increase the "quality of life" are strong motivating forces. The areas of scientific endeavor that research these first two "alchemical" goals cross several disciplines and sub-disciplines besides chemistry, i.e. molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, genetics, and immunology.
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Panacea (Greek Πανάκεια, Panakeia) was the goddess of cures. She was the daughter of Asclepius, god of medicine, and the granddaughter of Apollo, god of healing (among other things).
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disease is an abnormal condition of an organism that impairs bodily functions. In human beings, "disease" is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes discomfort, dysfunction, distress, social problems, and/or death to the person afflicted, or similar problems
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Immortality (or eternal life) is the concept of living in physical or spiritual form for an infinite length of time. What form an unending or indefinitely-long human life would take, or whether the soul, should such a thing exist, possesses immortality, has been the subject
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In the history of science, alchemy (Arabic: الخيمياء, al-khimia) refers to both an early form of the investigation of nature and an early philosophical and spiritual discipline, both combining elements of chemistry,
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The elixir of life, also known as the elixir of immortality or Dancing Water or Aab-e-Hayaat آب حیات and sometimes equated with the philosopher's stone, is a legendary potion, or drink, that grants the drinker eternal
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The philosopher's stone (Latin: lapis philosophorum; Greek: chrysopoeia) is a legendary substance, supposedly capable of turning inexpensive metals into gold; it was also sometimes believed to be a means of making people younger (Elixir of life).
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The Macro Expansion Template Attribute Language complements TAL, providing macros which allow the reuse of code across template files. Both were created for Zope but are used in other Python projects as well.
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GOLD refers to one of the following:
  • GOLD (IEEE) is an IEEE program designed to garner more student members at the university level (Graduates of the Last Decade).
  • GOLD (parser) is an open source BNF parser.

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Patent medicine is the somewhat misleading term given to various medical compounds sold under a variety of names and labels, though they were, for the most part, actually medicines with trademarks, not patented medicines.
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Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine used to treat joint pain. However, the most common usage of the words is as a derogatory term for compounds offered as medicines which implies that they are fake, fraudulent, or ineffective.
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The elixir of life, also known as the elixir of immortality or Dancing Water or Aab-e-Hayaat آب حیات and sometimes equated with the philosopher's stone, is a legendary potion, or drink, that grants the drinker eternal
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For a non-technical introduction to the topic, see .
A gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions.
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Heredity (the adjective is hereditary
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