ISHS Acta Horticulturae 756: International Symposium on Medicinal and Nutraceutical Plants
LESSONS FROM MALARIA |
| Author: | J.L. Swerdlow |
| Abstract:
Malaria offers important lessons in the relationship between plants and human disease because two of the three broad categories of drugs that modern medicine now uses to treat and prevent malaria come from plants. Today’s researchers, furthermore, have discovered more than one thousand plants that produce compounds that are bioactive against malaria (Bodeker and Burford, 2007). To learn these lessons is especially important because plants offer so much (Swerdlow, 2000), and yet modern pharmaceutical researchers have virtually abandoned them. Since the early 1960s, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved two compounds from rosy periwinkle as anti-cancer drugs, this agency has approved about 5,000 drugs, and among these, at most—a dozen come from a natural source. And even when interesting “lead compounds” come from natural sources, they are far more likely to be derived from microbes or the oceans—where, among other things, no supply or ownership issues exist (Newman et al., 2003; Basso et al., 2005; Tripathi et al., 2005; Butler, 2004). A broad examination of the scientific literature, fortunately, suggests that malaria can teach us important lessons. Indeed, two very simple—and interrelated—ideas emerge. I am using the word “simple” carefully, in the same way that Vincent Van Gogh used it when he said, “How difficult it is to be simple.” (Swerdlow, 1997). I am also mindful of what Jacques Monod, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1965 for his work on the genetics of bacteria, once said, “People in the scientific community usually react in two ways to new ideas. First, they say it is ridiculous, then they say it is obvious.” | |
Download Adobe Acrobat Reader (free software to read PDF files) | |
