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02 January 2008, 12:10
On a Remote Method to Cures - Contemporary York Times
To Mr. Kilham, the offering - an appeal to the gods for a bountiful reap of maca, a local tuber - is just another day at the office. Belongings David Attenborough, part Indiana Jones, Mister
Kilham, an ethnobotanist from Massachusetts who calls himself the Medicine Hunter, has scoured remote jungles and highlands representing three decades for plants, lubricant and extracts that can heal.
He has eaten bees and scorpions in China, fired breathe guns with Amazonian natives, and learned traditional war dances from Pacific Islanders. But behind the colourful tales lies the prospect of money, lots of money - for Western pharmaceutical companies, impoverished indigenous tribes and Mr. Kilham.
Products that once seemed exotic, like ginseng, ginkgo biloba or aloe vera, now roll out the tongues of Westerners. Kilham credence in multinational narcotic companies underutilize the medicinal properties in plants. They pack pills with artificial compounds and sell them at huge markups, he says.
He crave Westerners to application the unmixed tree medicines that indigenous peoples acquire used for thousands of years. People in the U.S. Kilham said.
I want human beings using safer medicine. And that means plant medicine." Easy going and earnest, Mr. Kilham, 55, caught the plant bug after beguiling an herb walk at an organic farm in Natick, Mass., 1971. A self-described hippie, he was already into "yoga, natural foods and meditation" and the discovery that plants had medicinal properties had a profound effect.
He created a course 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. These days he can identify unusual shrub by their Latin names and he proudly regales the uninitiated on their individual properties.
Presently after leaving Lima on a trip taking French businessmen to the Peruvian Andes, he stopped the vehivle and enthusiastically explained how the tropane alkaloids in a dusty vegetable he spotted by the side of the method are cast-off close to ophthalmologists to dilate pupils championing eye examinations.
Such properties are often well known by indigenous peoples.
So-called bioprospectors can build their fortunes by bringing those advantages to the attention of fellowship who identify the plant's full compound and use it as a example ingredient for new products that they patent.
Latin American nations, mainly Amazonian nations, have extremely rich and diverse flora, so the potential for commercial applications appears 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, however when you do hit on something that does become a mart leader you can constitute enormous adds up to of bucks from it." In Peru, Mr.
Kilham is betting on maca, a small seat vegetable that grows here in the central highlands - "a turnip that packs a punch," he says, adding "it imparts energy, sex drive and stamina like nothing else."
That belief is supported next to studies carried out at the International Potato Center, a Lima-based research center that is internationally financed and staffed. Studies there show maca betters stamina, reduces the risk of prostate cancer and increases the motility, volume and quality of sperm.
Some peer reviewed studies published in the calendar Reproductive Biol and Endocrinology backed up those findings. For centuries, maca has been a revered crop in this austerely beautiful territory 155 miles northeast of Lima.