A Romance with a Rainforest's Miracles
11/30/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: A Romance with a Rain Forest and its Elusive
Miracles
Source: The New York Times
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 30, 1999
Byline: 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 prospect 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 celebre, 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."