The benefits to be gained by screening plants for potential medical efficacy are substantial.

Ethnobotanical Research Yields Substantial Return on Investment

After decades of decline in natural products research, the systematic examination of nature's resources is once again on the rise. A number of university and government research institutes and pharmaceutical companies are actively pursuing the development of new medicinal compounds from plants. Conservationists and large pharmaceutical companies are now allies, a movement spearheaded by the well-publicized joint venture between Merck and Costa Rica's INBio -- a bold effort to catalog and protect the tiny Central American country's biodiversity by proving the value of intact ecosystems through quantifiable natural product isolation and production.

The benefits to be gained by screening plants for potential medical efficacy are substantial, both economically and socially. A number of promising compounds are currently being investigated. For example, the NCI is studying four species having anti-HIV activity including Ancistrocladus korupensis from Cameroon, Calophyllum sp. from Malaysia, Conospermum sp. from Australia, and Homolanthus sp. from Western Samoa (Balick ed). The Ancistrocladus also shows promise as a new antimalarial agent (Hallock et. al. 1994).

Additional efforts to discover new medicinal compounds involve working with local and indigenous peoples throughout the developing world. There is little doubt that some of the great diversity of chemical compounds found in nature could be developed as therapeutic agents, with the help of these peoples. This would be of great value to global health, provided that the development and benefits gained from new molecular entitites derived from biodiversity are equally distributed both to people who need the medication and to the countries and regions from which they have been discovered. This is a part of the social justice that must go hand in hand with attempts to develop products based on the indigenous knowledge systems.

It is imperative that local and indigenous peoples are the beneficiaries of efforts to capitalize on their traditional knowledge and remain the guardians of the forest and their ancestral lands.

Maintaining biological and cultural diversity requires acknowledging the value of indigenous knowledge systems, including the "specialist" knowledge of traditional healers (curanderos, shamans, etc.), as well as the "common" medicinal plant knowledge of community members. It is also crucial to acknowledge the importance of traditional medicine to these peoples (King, in Balick, et. al. 1996). After all, the same medicinal plants that we are researching for "new" pharmacological activity have, in many cases, been used for hundreds to thousands of years within a traditional system of medicine that includes information about safety, efficacy and effectiveness that is not dependant on our concepts of value. Given the dependence of many of the world's peoples on traditional plant-based medicines, efforts to conserve biological and cultural diversity, and to develop "new" compounds, should not undermine these traditional knowledge systems.

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References on this page:

Balick, M.J., E. Elisabetsky, and S. Laird, eds. 1996. Medicinal Resources of the Tropical Forest: Biodiversity and its Importance to Human Health. New York: Columbia University Press.
Articles by authors in the above text:

• King, S. "Conservation and tropical medicinal plant research." Pp 63-74.

Hallock, Y.F., et. al. 1994. Journal of Organic Chemistry. 59: 6349-6355.

 

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