On a Remote Path to Cures - New York Times

To Mr. Kilham, the offering - an interrogate to the gods for a bountiful harvest of maca, a resident tuber - is just another period at the office. Part David Attenborough, part Indiana Jones, Mr.

Kilham, an ethnobotanist from Massachusetts who cry out himself the Pharmaceutical Hunter, has scoured remote jungles and highlands for three decades championing plants, oils and extracts that can heal. He has eaten bees and scorpions in China, fired blow guns with Amazonian natives, and learned traditional war dances from Pacific Islanders.

But behind the colorful tales lies the prospect of money, group of banknote - for Western pharmaceutical companies, impoverished indigenous tribes and Mr. Kilham. Products that once seemed exotic, like ginseng, ginkgo biloba or aloe vera, now roll off the tongues of Westerners.

Kilham into multinational drug companies underutilize the medicinal properties in plants. They pack bolus with manufactured compounds and transfer them at huge markups, he says.

He crave Westerners to use the pure plant medicament that local peoples have used for thousands of years. People in the U.S. Kilham said. I want people using safer medicine. And that means vegetable medicine."

Easy affluent and earnest, Mr. Kilham, 55, caught the plant bug after taking an herb walk at an organic holding in Natick, Mass., 1971.

A self-described hippie, he was already into "yoga, natural foods and meditation" and the discovery that vegetable had healing properties had a profound effect.

He created a succession in holistic health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he is now on the faculty, and made his first overseas trip - to India - to track down exotic flora.

Now he can identify meagre plants by their Latin names and he proudly regales the uninitiated on their definite properties.

Shortly after leaving Lima on a trip enchanting French businessmen to the Peruvian Andes, he stopped the van and enthusiastically explained how the tropane alkaloids in a dusty tree he spotted by the sometimes of the road are old beside ophthalmologists to dilate pupils for eyeball examinations.

Such properties are often well known close to aboriginal peoples.

So-called bioprospectors can create their fortunes by bringing those advantages to the affliction of fellowship who ascertain the plant's active compound and use it as a base ingredient representing new products that they patent.

Latin American nations, especially Amazonian nations, have extremely rich and diverse flora, so the likely for commercial applications put in an appearance great," said Tony Gross, a Brazil-based researcher at the university. They say that in one in 10,000 you get something interesting.

So it is not a gold mine, but when you achieve hit on something that does be remodelled a market leader you can make enormous amounts of money from it." In Peru, Mister

Kilham is betting on maca, a small foundation vegetable that develop here in the central highlands - "a turnip that bale a punch," he says, adding "it imparts energy, sex drive and intestinal fortitude like nothing else."

That view is supported by studies carried absent at the International Potato Center, a Lima-based research center that is internationally financed and staffed. Studies there show maca amend stamina, reduces the risk of prostate cancer and increases the motility, volume and quality of sperm.

From http://nytimes.com/2008/01/01/business/worldbusiness/01hunte~.html%3fref%3damericas