Ethnopharmacological conservation: a key to progress in medicine

Abstract

The perspicacity with which man in primitive societies takes advantage of his ambient vegetation has long been a source of admiration. Most of hisknowledge of plant uses, of course, must be the result of trial and error. Some of his discoveries of plant properties, however, are so complex that it seems to be almost impossible to expiain how they could have been accomplished. This complexity is nowhere more obvious than in the intricate recipes for the preparation of arrow poisons. There have long been two strongly divergent poles in our eval uat ion of ethnobotany. Some students are carried away in an enthusiastic assumption that native peoples every_ where have a special intuition in unlocking the secrets of the Plant Kingdom. Otherscast aside or at least denigrate ali aboriginal folk lore as not worthy of serious scientific consideration. Both viewpoints, of course, are unwarranted. The accomplishments of native peoples in understanding plant properties sothorough_ ly must be simply a result of a long and intimate association with their floras and their utter dependence on them. Consequently—and espec ial 1 y since so much aborig ina 1 knowledge is based on experimentation—it warrants careful and criticai attention on the part of modern scientific efforts. It behooves us to take advantage now of this extensive knowledge that still exists in many parts of the world, lest it be lost with the inexora ble onrush of civilization and the resulting extinction of one primitive culture after another. This experimenta11y acquired knowledge may not much longer be available. The denigration of aboriginal knowledge of the biodynamism of plants has even led certain specialists recently to assert that there is little or no correlation between native uses of medicinal plants and the chemistry of these species.This viewpoint is not borne out by the history of some of the most recently discovered drugs that have come originally from the Plant Kingdom—the so—called Wonder Drugs of the past hal fcentury. These numerous Wonder Drugs that have revolutionized modern medicai practices have almost ali first been isolated from plants employed for one purpose or another in primitive or ancient societies: the curare alkaloids; penicillin and other antibiotics; cortisone; reserpine; vincoleucoblastine; the Veratrum-alkalolds; podophy1lotoxin; stro