From BLAND_JIM@smc.edu Sun Jun 11 12:41:13 2000 Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 14:39:04 -0700 From: BLAND_JIMTo: Natural History of South Asia - General discussion and research Subject: A tale of bioprospecting in the New World Tropics [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Thought this might be of interest to those concerned with bioprospecting: November 30, 1999 NY Times SCIENTIST AT WORK / Dr. Mark J. Plotkin A Romance With a Rain Forest and Its Elusive Miracles By JON CHRISTENSEN It has the makings of a good story and Dr. Mark J. Plotkin clearly relishes the beginning. If only it had a happy ending. Deep in the Amazon jungle, on a prospecting mission for Shaman Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Plotkin was living out the romantic dream of every scientist who studies how people use plants. The company had staked millions of dollars on finding a breakthrough drug by sending ethnobotanists like Dr. Plotkin to confer with shamans in the rain forest and bring back promising plants. Adding poignancy to the quest, Dr. Plotkin was searching for plants to treat diabetes, which had killed his grandmothers. Dr. Plotkin described the symptoms to a medicine man from the Sikiyana-Chikena tribe: sores between the toes, incessant thirst, fading eyesight. He then followed the shaman into the forest and watched him pick a trailside herb, peel long strips of bark from a towering tree and drain sap from a twisted vine. Back at the village, he boiled all the ingredients together in a clay pot over a wood fire. That night, the shaman gave the thick reddish-brown liquid to a young Indian woman with a nearly fatal case of diabetes. The next morning her blood sugar level was almost normal. Within a few days she was well enough to work in her garden again. "I was knocked over," Dr. Plotkin said. "He literally raised that woman from the dead." Alas, the medicine did not pan out back in the lab at Shaman Pharmaceuticals in South San Francisco. And when the Food and Drug Administration sent the company's most promising new drug prospect, a diarrhea remedy from an Amazon tree, back for more clinical trials, Shaman Pharmaceuticals' stock slid until it was virtually worthless. In February 1999, the company abandoned the quest to make drugs from rain forest remedies and decided to sell dietary supplements instead. Dr. Plotkin has since severed his ties with the company, which has changed its name to ShamanBotanicals.com. He also had the company remove every reference to his name from its Web site. He renounced bioprospecting, the search for medicines and other useful products, because it had become too controversial in South America, where indigenous tribes had complained that bioprospectors were stealing their secrets and getting rich from them. Dr. Plotkin said the idea that bioprospectors were profiting from Indian knowledge also hindered his ability to raise money for his own nonprofit organization, the Amazon Conservation Team, which works with shamans in Colombia and other countries to preserve their knowledge. For Dr. Plotkin, 44, this falling out represented a career crisis, although he played down its significance. His experience is emblematic of the changes that have occurred in a field in which old-fashioned botanists once toiled in obscurity until saving the rain forest became a cause célèbre, and ethnobotanists like Dr. Plotkin linked their fortunes to the pharmaceutical industry, only to discover that medical miracles are rare, even in the rain forest. Dr. Plotkin had built his reputation on the claim that the rain forest was a pharmacy filled with wonder drugs known to traditional healers who were eager to share their knowledge. Shaman Pharmaceuticals was one of many companies that wanted to find the proof and help provide a financial incentive to save the rain forest. "We all had a mantra that we had to save the rain forest because it was a repository of natural drugs," said Dr. Wade Davis, who studied ethnobotany at Harvard and watched Dr. Plotkin's rapid rise. Dr. Plotkin had followed a roundabout path to the rain forest. The son of a Jewish shoe salesman in a poor black neighborhood in New Orleans, he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania's biology department after less than a year because he was more interested in studying whole organisms than cells and microbes. He went to Cambridge and got a job unpacking specimens at the Harvard Zoological Museum, and went to night school through the university's extension program. He went on to study at Yale and Tufts and worked as a research associate at the Harvard Botanical Museum under Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, who inspired Dr. Plotkin and others with his tales of Indian ceremonies and hallucinogenic potions. "If you can't interest people in rain forests, hallucinogenic plants, and naked people," Dr. Schultes liked to say, "then you're in the wrong line of business." For his doctoral research, Dr. Plotkin cataloged the medicinal plants of the Tirio tribe in Suriname. At the same time, he began carving out a career away from the academic world as an environmental activist working for Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund. Both organizations were eager to publicize the exploits of the dashing young ethnobotanist who was working with Indians to discover medicines and save the rain forest. His reputation was cemented in a 1989 Smithsonian magazine cover story that showed Dr. Plotkin in face paint and an Indian ceremonial headdress deep in the Amazon. Profile writers have compared him to Indiana Jones, and quoted sympathetic colleagues who called Dr. Plotkin the Carl Sagan of the rain forest. But there have also been strong undercurrents of skepticism about his showmanship and his affection for feathers and fame over peer reviewed science, where his record is thin. "He's doing great stuff educating people and trying to save indigenous knowledge," said a former colleague, Dr. Tom Carlson, vice president for medical ethnobotany of the company ShamanBotanicals.com. "But in terms of rigorous ethnobotanical science, very little of his work was useful. And a lot of that had to do with sloppy research." As an example Dr. Carlson cites the story of the putative diabetes cure. Dr. Plotkin, he said, did not actually measure the patient's blood sugar level before the shaman administered the potion in the Amazon, and the plant specimens he sent back were poorly preserved and incorrectly labeled. Moreover, although Dr. Plotkin concluded that that the plants he sent back from the jungle showed no effects in laboratory tests, Dr. Carlson said that two of the plants did lower blood sugar in tests with mice, just not enough to justify further research. The company, Dr. Carlson said, is developing a line of glucose-lowering snacks for diabetics. But not with Dr. Plotkin's plants. Dr. Plotkin admits that he has been less than prolific in the scientific realm of enthnobotany. He said he had not shared his findings or contributed many plant collections to museums, the hallmark of a botany career in colleagues' eyes, because he does not want people to search his writings or botanical collections for clues to Indian medicines."My trust with the Indians is more important," he said. It was the increasing distrust of scientists among the Indians, in addition to the failure of the diabetes remedy, and the crash of Shaman Pharmaceuticals that finally made Dr. Plotkin give up on bioprospecting. . But he is sticking with the shamans. In October, Dr. Plotkin brought a group of Colombian shamans to the United States to protest scientific research on their plant knowledge without their consent. Draped in necklaces of bright beads, jungle seeds and jaguar claws, the shamans met with activists and donors across the country. They presented a statement condemning "anthropologists, botanists, physicians and other scientists who are conducting experiments with yage and other medicinal and sacred plants without taking into account our ancestral wisdom and our collective intellectual property rights." But on this trip, unlike others, Dr. Plotkin did not take the shamans to meet with any pharmaceutical companies. Some colleagues say Dr. Plotkin has contributed to an atmosphere of distrust by promoting the potential for finding profitable medicines in the Amazon, and then by joining the debate about property rights and royalties for products that have yet to pan out, even in the lab. Of course, Dr. Plotkin is not the only one responsible for the heavy promotion of the curative potential of the rain forest. Dr. Davis said he also played a role. "But the rhetoric ran away from reality," Dr. Davis said. "And the whole thing has backfired. We have not found new drugs. And the fact that the idea is deeply flawed is never questioned." In retrospect, it is pretty clear why the hypothesis was wrong, Dr. Davis said. The field had already been closely scrutinized. The Indians do know the forest after thousands of years of screening plants for medicinal properties, he said. But newcomers, starting with the Spanish conquistadors, quickly picked up the most obviously efficacious and economically valuable medicines, like coca, the basis for cocaine, the antimalarial medicine quinine, and the arrow poison curare, which is the basis for a muscle relaxant used in surgery. Although his own bioprospecting venture was a failure, Dr. Plotkin still believes in the magic of shamanism and the potential for new drugs. But if the idea ever does pay off, Dr. Plotkin will not be part of it. He is working with South American shamans to encourage them to preserve their sacred methods of healing. Dr. Plotkin now argues that his experience with the diabetes remedy illustrates the limitations of what he calls a reductionist approach: breaking the traditional jungle medicine into its chemical constituents to test it in a modern laboratory. Perhaps the medicine works more like a magic shotgun blast, he said, than a magic bullet. "When they couldn't reproduce it in the lab, it brought me up short," he said. "But when I went back to the jungle and saw the woman was still alive, it said to me, well, maybe the lab can't do everything it needs to do." ------------------------------------------------------------------------