NMR spectroscopy has been a technology of fundamental importance to drug discovery and development for the past 40-50 years, principally through its use in the structure elucidation of leads, drugs, their synthetic intermediates, and the degradation products and impurities of those drug molecules. In the past 30 years, another major area of application of NMR spectroscopy has been metabolic profiling or metabonomics studies of drug metabolism, drug safety, drug efficacy, and disease, through studies of biological fluids such as urine and plasma, representing a change in application from the chemical to the biological sciences. This trend has continued with significant progress in the application of in vivo MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to the study of disease states and their treatment in patients and in animal models. More recently, new applications of NMR spectroscopy have emerged such as hit-finding and hit-to-lead optimization, impacting directly on these early stages of the drug discovery process. Finally, the discovery of completely new areas, led by NMR spectroscopy, such as pharmacometabonomics, holds out the promise of improvements in personalized medicine in the future. This article will briefly cover all of these areas, and more, as a prelude to more detailed treatments in the following articles of this work.