Heroes of Medicine: The Plant Hunter

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ONLY YOUNG PRACTICING HEALERS, COX BELIEVES, CAN PREVENT THE LOSS OF CENTURIES OF KNOWLEDGE

Moments like this are typical of Cox's experience as he scours the world's flora in search of plants that will benefit Western medicine. Cox has spent years in Samoa interviewing or apprenticing himself to traditional healers. He has also traveled throughout the South Pacific, as well as in Southeast Asia, South America, East Africa and as far north as Sweden's Lapland. In Samoa alone, healers have led him and his colleagues to 74 medicinal plants that might prove useful.

Samoan healers concoct poultices and infusions from the leaves, bark and roots of local plants, using them for conditions that range from high fever to appendicitis. Among them are root of 'Ago (Curcuma longa) for rashes, leaves of the kuava tree (Psidium guajava) for diarrhea, and the bark of vavae (Ceiba pentandra) for asthma. Virtually all the healers are women who learned their art from their mothers, who in turn learned it from their mothers. Now knowledge of the recipes and their administration, even the location of the plants in the forests, is endangered as more and more daughters forgo the long filial apprenticeships in favor of using Western pills and ointments.

For this reason, the discovery of young practicing healers like Salome delights Cox, who believes that only people like her can prevent the loss of centuries of knowledge. If he can carry Salome's knowledge to the developed world in the form of plants whose myriad chemical compounds might help combat incurable diseases--notably cancer, aids and Alzheimer's--the impetus to save the Samoan rain forest, and all forests, will be that much stronger.

Fewer than 1% of the world's 265,000 flowering plants, most inhabiting equatorial regions, have been tested for their effectiveness against disease. "We haven't even scratched the surface--not even in our own backyard," says Jim Miller, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden's natural-products program. Yet nearly a quarter of prescription drugs sold in the U.S. are based on chemicals from just 40 plant species. Examples are abundant. Codeine and morphine are derived from poppies. Vincristine and vinblastine, isolated from the rosy periwinkle, help treat cancers, including Hodgkin's disease and some leukemias. Curare, taken from several lethal Amazonian plants and often used to tip hunting arrows, is used in drugs that bolster anesthesia. An extract of the snakeroot plant, reserpine, traditionally employed in Asia to counteract poisonous snake bite, is the basis of a number of tranquilizers and hypertension drugs. Taxol, a compound in the bark of the Pacific yew, is used to treat some cases of advanced ovarian and breast cancer.