Prague has an almost unaltered medieval street that was once home to alchemists. They would spend day and night bent over their tests tubes and retorts, seeking to turn base metals into gold.

All over the world their 21st-century counterparts, medical scientists, spend long hours in laboratories planning, experimenting, testing and finally organising clinical trials for new drugs. The cost of a fundamentally new product is now £750 million.

The alchemists never succeeded. Our modern scientists do succeed in their quests, but too often patients let their hard-won products — such as childrens’ medicines, and eye drops for all ages — go to waste.

It might have been easier to persuade the Russian monk Rasputin to wash than to get small children to swallow medicine. They cough, splutter and screw up their faces before spitting it out. But now Grunethal has come up with a new delivery system, Clarosip, which takes the stress out of giving the antibiotic clarithromycin to children.

The medication is packed in a brightly coloured straw containing one dose of the antibiotic in the form of tasty granules. The child has only to suck a drink of his choice through the straw to receive the full dose.

The neat device for administering eye drops is Autodrop, produced by Owen Mumford, of Oxford. This eye bath, available from chemists’, is made so that the small plastic bottle of drops from the pharmacy fits into the bath’s underside. When the bottle is squeezed the drops all reach the eye, rather than roll down the cheeks.