This book, based on published studies, takes a unique perspective on the 30-year collapse of pharmaceutical industry productivity in the search for small molecule "magic bullet" interventions. The relentless escalation of inflation-adjusted cost per approved medicine in the United States from $200 million in 1950 to $1.2 billion in 2010 has driven industry giants to, at best, slavish imitation in drug design, and at worst, to abandonment of research and embracing of widespread fraud in consumer marketing.

The book adapts formalism across a number of disciplines to the strategy for design of mutilevel interventions, focusing, first, on molecular, cellular, and larger scale examples, and extending the argument to the simplifications provided by the dominant role of social and cultural structures and processes in individual and population patterns of health and illness.

In place of "magic bullets," we must now apply "magic strategies" that act across both the scale and level of organization. This book provides an introductory roadmap to the new tools that will be needed for the design of such strategies.