Enchanting with paperwork: epistemic pluralism and Western herbalists in the United States

Non-technical summary This article examines the challenges and opportunities to integrate diverse sources of evidence in assessments produced by international platforms working at the science–policy interface. Diversity (or pluralism) of sources of literature, both in terms of their geographic origin and disciplinary focus, is essential for assessments to inform decision-making across social–ecological contexts. Using the recently completed ‘Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature’ of the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services as a case, we find that significant effort has been dedicated to reviewing diverse literature. We discuss three strategies to expand pluralism in future assessments. Technical summary Representing plural views in science–policy platforms is essential to avoid reproducing geographic and epistemic biases that permeate contemporary scientific knowledge production and synthesis. The Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has strived to produce assessments that incorporate information from diverse regions and knowledge systems. We explore the geographic and epistemic pluralism of the literature included in the ‘Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature’ (VA), and the challenges and opportunities to achieve such knowledge pluralism. We applied a bibliometric analysis to the sources of evidence cited in the VA, and reflected on the assessment development process, in which we were directly involved. Our results highlight the success of different strategies developed by VA experts to engage with diverse sources of literature. Still, most evidence was English-language academic literature produced in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, echoing the prominence of this literature in scientific publication in environmental disciplines. Reflecting on our experiences, we discuss strategies that could further enhance the geographic and epistemic pluralism in the information reviewed for future environmental assessments produced by IPBES and other international science–policy platforms. Social media summary Epistemic and geographic pluralism was partially achieved in IPBES Values Assessment, and can be further enhanced in future assessments.

In contrast to the long Chinese history of cultivation of Ganoderma species (ling zhi/reishi), the most important medicinal mushroom in China, growing reishi is a fairly new adventure in North America. In the past decade or so, increasing awareness of the potential health benefits of Ganoderma species led to production of this medicinal mushroom in the United States and Canada. Such interest was triggered primarily by the immune-enhancing property of the mushroom in integrated therapies for immune deficiency syndrome and cancer. In pharmacological studies in the United States, the search for effective antiinflammatory agents for safe long-term use was directed to this ancient medicinal mushroom. Western herbalists took initiatives in studying and using Ganoderma lucidum (Curt.:Fr.P. Karst.) and other species. Growers across the Pacific Ocean chose almost exclusively G. lucidum as the species for cultivation. North American Ganoderma growers are characterized on the basis of product orientation. Features of emerging North American growers are described. Methodology used in Ganoderma cultivation in North America is illustrated, focusing on synthetic log and natural log cultivation. Highlighted is the successful commercial-scale operation of Organotech in San Antonio, Texas. As a reference for growers, stepwise cultivation technology and crop management is covered.

Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and PolicyVol. 2, No. 3 Full Text CasesUnited States v. Berks County, 250 F. Supp 2d 525 (E.D. Pa. 2003)Published Online:6 Jul 2004https://doi.org/10.1089/153312903322146654AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited bySticking Points: Epistemic Pluralism in Legal Challenges to Mandatory Vaccination PoliciesSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 161Sex Segregation in Sports as a Public Health IssueSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 12An Empirical Survey of No-Injury Class ActionsSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 9212A FRAND Contractts Intended Third-Party BeneficiarySSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 793The Public Interest Class ActionSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 602Applying Citizens United to Ordinary CorruptionSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 84Moving Forward: Legal Solutions to Lake Erie's Harmful Algal BloomsSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 17Confronting the Peppercorn Settlement in Merger Litigation: An Empirical Analysis and a Proposal for ReformSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 212Rethinking Regulation and Innovation in the U.S. Legal Services MarketSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 953In Search of Equitable Considerations: Redefining Attorney-Fee-Shifting Liability Under the Lanham Act to Deter Trademark Infringement and Better Protect Small Business OwnersSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 7132The Life, Death, and Revival of Implied ConfidentialitySSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 327Facts in Exile: Corruption and Abstraction in Citizens United v. Federal Election CommissionSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 784The Upside of Abortion Disclosure LawsSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 11Conflicts of Interest: Slicing the Hot Potato DoctrineSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 825Contributory Negligence, Technology, and Trade SecretsSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 623Federalism, Substantive Preemption, and Limits on Antitrust: An Application to Patent HoldupSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 209Orwell's Vision: Video and the Future of Civil Rights EnforcementSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 169Making the World Safe for Standard SettingSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 235The Undercivilization of Corporate LawSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 1350Legal Hazard: Corporate Crime, Advancement of Executives' Defense Costs, and the Federal CourtsSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 579Has the Law Made Liars of Us All?SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 433 Volume 2Issue 3Sep 2003 To cite this article:United States v. Berks County, 250 F. Supp 2d 525 (E.D. Pa. 2003).Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy.Sep 2003.437-452.http://doi.org/10.1089/153312903322146654Published in Volume: 2 Issue 3: July 6, 2004PDF download

BackgroundNew Canadian policy to regulate natural health products (NHPs), such as herbs and vitamins were implemented on January 1st, 2004. We explored complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners' perceptions of how the new regulations may affect their practices and relationships with patients/consumers.MethodsThis was an applied ethnographic study. Data were collected in fall 2004 via qualitative interviews with 37 Canadian leaders of four CAM groups that use natural products as a core part of their practises: naturopathic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), homeopathic medicine and Western herbalism. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded independently by a minimum of two investigators using content analysis.ResultsThree key findings emerged from the data: 1) all CAM leaders were concerned with issues of their own access to NHPs; 2) all the CAM leaders, except for the homeopathic leaders, specifically indicated a desire to have a restricted schedule of NHPs; and 3) only naturopathic leaders were concerned the NHP regulations could potentially endanger patients if they self-medicate incorrectly.ConclusionNaturopaths, TCM practitioners, homeopaths, and Western herbalists were all concerned about how the new NHP regulations will affect their access to the products they need to practice effectively. Additional research will need to focus on what impacts actually occur as the regulations are implemented more fully.

Antibacterial activity and gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC–MS)-based metabolite profiles of Celtis africana and its endophytic extracts

This study examines how educative leadership theories have evolved in multicultural contexts, beginning with developments in Australia in the 1990s and extending to international trends. Using a philosophical methodology informed by critical multiculturalism and non-foundational epistemology, it analyses and refines leadership theories that promote equity, inclusion, and epistemic pluralism. The study finds that policies in Australia, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union are shaped by shared moral commitments to social justice, pluralism, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. Yet persistent inequities and nationalist resistance reveal the need for continued ethical leadership and policy innovation. The study proposes a contextually adaptive model of educative leadership—drawing on transformative, distributed, instructional, ethical, adaptive, and culturally responsive approaches—grounded in pragmatic holism to address the complexities of diverse educational environments.

What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants – and if so, how? In this article, the author engages with Western herbalists in the rural northeast of the United States as they transmit knowledge about medicinal plants. She focuses on herbalist teachings which use ‘the doctrine of signatures’ as a framework for the learning process of attuning bodily attention to plants. Herbalist modes of learning how to attend to, and thereby enable, communicative relationships of different sorts with plants have implications for the ways that humans understand the interconnectedness between human life and other kinds of life. Cross‐disciplinary multispecies studies may learn from herbalist practices as well, opening up a more vibrant set of possibilities for thinking about the connection, communication and relationship between humans and other‐than‐humans. The broader context of this cross‐species attention lies in the question of how humans and other beings can learn to attend to one another and mutually thrive in a time of environmental disruption.

The glutathione transferases (GSTs) of plants are a superfamily of abundant enzymes whose roles in endogenous metabolism are largely unknown. For example, the lambda class of GSTs (GSTLs) have members that are selectively induced by chemical stress treatments and based on their enzyme chemistry are predicted to have roles in redox homeostasis. However, using conventional approaches these functions have yet to be determined. To address this, recombinant GSTLs from wheat and Arabidopsis were tagged with a Strep tag and after affinity-immobilization, incubated with extracts from Arabidopsis, tobacco, and wheat. Bound ligands were then recovered by solvent extraction and identified by mass spectrometry (MS). With the wheat enzyme TaGSTL1, the ligand profiles obtained with in vitro extracts from tobacco closely matched those observed after the protein had been expressed in planta, demonstrating that these associations were physiologically representative. The stress-inducible TaGSTL1 was found to selectively recognize flavonols (e.g. taxifolin; K(d) = 25 nM), with this binding being dependent upon S-glutathionylation of an active site cysteine. In the case of the wheat extracts, this selectivity in ligand recognitions lead to the detection of flavonols that had not been previously described in this cereal. Subsequent in vitro assays showed that the co-binding of flavonols, such as quercetin, to the thiolated TaGSTL1 represented an intermediate step in the reduction of the respective S-glutathionylated quinone derivatives to yield free flavonols. These results suggest a novel role for GSTLs in maintaining the flavonoid pool under stress conditions.

In recent years, Western herbalists, often of settler descent, have contended with a lineage of appropriation and their ongoing relationships with Native plants, communities, and land. Critical—and hard to find—are stories of botanical circulations that foreground the dynamics of circulation, pluralism, and colonialism in which appropriation can be understood and its lessons applied. This article offers one such story. White pine was—and is—an important medicine within Indigenous Ojibwe medical traditions. As such, it was studied and written about by ethnobotanists working in close relation to Ojibwe communities in the early twentieth century. Such circulations took place amid land allotment, industrialized logging, the devastation of pine forests, and the marginalization of botanic practices. Situating stories of white pine in Indigenous, settler colonial, and herbal studies, this article argues that long histories of Western herbalism illuminate botanical appropriation as a settler logic with important consequences for present-day herbal practices.

The U.S. Bioeconomy: Charting a Course for a Resilient and Competitive Future

Rockwell International Corporation has established an automated database system for the storage, retrieval and analysis of focal plane manufacturing information. In 1983, Rockwell implemented the first fully certified Mercury Cadmium Telluride (HgCdTe) production facility in the United States. As part of the development of this facility, key processing variables were identified for inclusion in a comprehensive data base. Our database system contains information from boule, slice, wafer and die sources. The current database consists of data from over one million on-line measurments drawn from the entire range of our production and test facilities. Database analysis routines provide various tabular, plot and statistical output that are used toward the goals of lowering cost and improving yield in the process of HgCdTe manufacturing.

Parasitic nematode diseases cause major morbidity and mortality in humans globally and impact the world economy through extensive infection of crops and livestock. Resistance to anthelmintics is widespread in worm populations and therefore there is a continuous need for the new anthelmintic. Using parasitic worms in screens for new anthelmintics is extremely costly and has a low hit rate. This thesis aimed to overcome those problems by selecting ethnomedicinal plants based on their traditional use by indigenous people, and combine this preselection tool with the most studied nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model to screen selected ethnomedicinal plant extracts for their anthelmintic activity. The first aim of this thesis was to screen traditional medicinal plant extracts for their anthelmintic activity using C. elegans. The plant extracts were selected by indigenous communities from Sarawak, Malaysia, based on their use in de-worming remedies. A 96 well plate based assay was developed to screen the nematocidal activity of the plant extracts. The effective plant extracts were tested against Haemonchus contortus, the most economically important animal parasitic nematode in the world. To further investigate their effect on C. elegans, we took advantage of the vast genetic resource of C. elegans to characterize the stress responses of the effective plant extracts and discovered effective plant extracts elicit unique stress reporter profiles compared to the commercially available anthelmintics. The second aim of this project was designed to illustrate the most effective plant extract and investigate its killing mechanism. We fractionated the most effective plant extract, and tested fractions on C. elegans. The anthelmintic activity was determined to exist in a single fraction which killed 90% of C. elegans adults. The efficacy of this fraction on parasitic nematodes was validated via H. contortus motility assay. Analysis of gene expression of selected genes by qRT-PCR confirmed iv the stress reporter strain findings and gave temporal changes in gene expression post exposure to the most effective fraction. Transcriptome-wide analysis of gene expression by next-generation sequencing discovered the effects of compounds on ER, mitochondria and lipid metabolism affecting energy production in C. elegans. Our findings showed that C. elegans is not only a good tool for preliminary screening, but may also be useful for examining the effects of compounds on nematodes and to understand the mechanism of action of the compounds. Moreover, the project demonstrates that selecting plants on the basis of their traditional application is an important approach to identify new anthelmintic compounds.

Background: Research indicates an increase in drug resistance to pathogenic human bacteria, despite the increase in synthetic antimicrobial drugs. As a result, medicinal plants are proving to be rich resources of constituents which can be used in drug development and synthesis of antimicrobial agents and/or their derivatives. Many of therapeutic drugs e.g. antimicrobial, anti-cancer and antioxidants have compounds extracted from plants as their primary active ingredients or molecules of plant origin serve as blue prints for synthetic or partially synthetic drugs. Methods: The antimicrobial activity of the Asparagus laricinus aqueous extract was evaluated by determination of minimum inhibitory concentration against laboratory strains of both gram-positive ( Bacillus subtilis , Streptococcus pneumonia and Staphylococcus aureus ) and gram-negative bacteria ( Pseudomonas aeruginosa , Escherichia coli and Proteus vulgaris ). The micro-plate assays based on iodo-nitrotetrazolium violet indicator was used to evaluate cell viability. Antioxidative stress activity of the extract was determined using Saccharomyces cerevisiae (BY4742) as the model eukaryotic system, while constitutes of the plant extract were profiled using LC/MS. Results: This study reports on the anti-bacterial and antioxidative stress activity of Asparagus laricinus . It was observed that 50µg/ml of the plant extract was the (MIC) for the gram-positive bacteria Bacillus subtilis , Streptococcus pneumonia and Staphylococcus aureus . While100µg/ml that was required for other gram-negative strains, Pseudomonas aeruginosa , Escherichia coli and Proteus vulgaris and Staphylococcus aureus was inhibited by 25µg/ml of the plant extract. The plant extract protected Saccharomycescerevisiae (BY4742) cells from oxidative stress when the cells were incubated with 10mM (H 2 O 2 ) for 1.5 hours. The phyto constituents of the plant extract were profiled using LC/MS and four major peaks were assigned chemical formulae. Conclusions: Asparagus laricinus water extract showed antimicrobial and antioxidative stress activities. LC/MS profile of major constituents of the plant extract revealed the presence of an alkaloid similar to 4-thiazolidinones, known to have important biological activities.

Quinolizidine alkaloids exhibit various forms of biological activity. A lot of them were found in the Leguminosae family, including Laburnum and Genista. The aim of the study was the optimization of a chromatographic system for the analysis of cytisine and N-methylcytisine in various plant extracts as well as an investigation of the cytotoxic activities of selected alkaloids and plant extracts obtained from Laburnum anagyroides, Laburnum anagyroides L. quercifolium, Laburnum alpinum, Laburnum watereri, Genista germanica, and Genista tinctoria against various cancer cell lines. The determination of investigated compounds was performed by High Performance Liquid Chromatography with Diode Array Detection (HPLC-DAD), while High Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled with Quadrupole Time-of-Flight–Mass Spectrometry (HPLC-QTOF-MS) was applied for the qualitative analysis of plant extracts. The retention, separation selectivity, peaks shape, and systems efficiency obtained for cytisine and N-methylcytisine in different chromatographic systems were compared. The application of columns with alkylbonded and phenyl stationary phases led to a very weak retention of cytisine and N-methylcytisine, even when the mobile phases containing only 5% of organic modifiers were used. The strongest retention was observed when hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) or especially when ion exchange chromatography (IEC) were applied. The most optimal system in terms of alkaloid retention, peak shape, and system efficiency containing an strong cation exchange (SCX) stationary phase and a mobile phase consisted of 25% acetonitrile and formic buffer at pH 4.0 was applied for investigating alkaloids analysis in plant extracts. Cytotoxic properties of the investigated plant extracts as well as cytisine and N-methylcytisine were examined using human tongue squamous carcinoma cells (SCC-25), human pharyngeal squamous carcinoma cells (FaDu), human triple-negative breast adenocarcinoma cell line (MDA-MB-231), and human breast adenocarcinoma cell line (MCF-7). The highest cytotoxic activity against FaDu, MCF-7, and MDA-MB cancer cell lines was observed after applying the Genista germanica leaves extract. In contrast, the highest cytotoxic activity against SCC-25 cell line was obtained after treating with the seed extract of Laburnum watereri. The investigated plant extracts exhibit significant cytotoxicity against the tested human cancer cell lines and seem to be promising for further research on its anticancer activity.

Editors’ Introduction