FEATURE- BM Hegde

Strange Bedfellows

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. I will here shroud till the dregs of the storm be past.”

WilliamShakespeare-The Tempest Act 2, Scene 2

Something has happened in the world for strange people to come together. It is almost like the serpent and the mongoose have become friends! Two sets of people, diametrically opposite in their approach to make big money (goal is the same, though), have now come together to save the Amazon forest. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this report. The Amazon loggers’ mafia and the US pharmaceutical industrial tycoons have befriended each other to save the Amazon forest for their own good. The latter think that their future depends on the treasures in the Amazon forest to find powerful drugs for all ills of mankind for big money. The reader might think they are doing it for ecological balance! Far from it, very far indeed! They had to befriend the former lest they should spoil their rice bowl. They could be partners instead, for mutual benefit.

Chemical reductionist molecules used as therapeutic drugs have come to grief. The adverse drug reactions (ADRs) have become a routine affair that it is the leading cause of death today. Newer and more potent antibiotics have become a nightmare. More potent pain killers are impossibility as the Placebo effect in the west is becoming stronger by the day and the companies are not able to show them to be better than the placebo! Cancer chemotherapy has been an utter failure and is deadlier than the cancer itself. The Pharma giants are learning from history where most powerful and useful drugs were discovered by local people in their own backyards.

Quinine was discovered from the bark of the Cinchona tree in Peru in the 15th Century as local people believed that God gives the medicines where He gives diseases. They went to the forest to get this beautiful white tree barkto successfully treat Malaria which killed millions there at that time; their Vice Roy’s wife was beautiful and her name was Cinchona. They named the tree after her. Europeans who were jealous of the Peruvians failed to spot the tree; instead they got the bark from Willow Tree which gave them salicylic acid. Vincristine, a powerful anti-cancer drug came from Vinca Rosea deep in the Amazon forests in the American continent. It is freely grown in India although its origin is supposed to be from Madagascar. Many other such examples could be cited. After getting frustrated by producing chemical molecules in the laboratory to stimulate or suppress some new receptors discovered by Nobel winning reductionist scientists, the US drug lords feel it will be more profitable and less dangerous to harvest good drugs from nature, especially the large forests reservoirs like the Amazon. They are trying to learn from the poet: “full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.” Full many a drug for disease cure the deep and blue forest treasures might hold. That is the long and the short of their love for the Amazon forest and its real guards-the loggers. Indirectly, mankind gets benefit if we preserve and increase the world’s forest cover.

These reservoirs might be holding the secret of cure for many an incurable disease today. Recently there has been a renewed interest in the wisdom of the aboriginal races found in pockets all over the world without any touch with the so called advanced world. Americans have found some such groups even deep inside the Amazon forest who have lived there without the touch of modern medicine etc. and have been tending to their sick in their own way successfully. Western medical juggernaut, reeling under its own heavy cost and prohibitive mortality rates, has been looking for such outlets to innovate. Those people do not have their textbooks or computers but have their elders to pass on the wisdom to the next generation. The only way to tap that wisdom is to befriend the people there.

When Europeans first came to the New World they wanted to finish off as many of these Native Americans as possible by arms, poisons, the deadly germs they brought with them etc. are now trying to woo them and also to locate more such groups in deeper forest areas, even here, for their own good and to satisfy their greed. This innate wisdom gets incorporated into their consciousness when they are made in their mothers’ womb itself and can be learnt from them by us. So far so good. There is one more danger lurking in the corner. That is the one up-man-ship of the western reductionist thinking. As soon as they find a herb or method to cure they use their reductionism to find out what chemicals are there in the medicine to be extracted to use it both for research to begin with and treatment later. This is bound to fail as the whole is not necessarily the sum total of the bits in nature. The interconnectedness is essential for any herb to act.

One example from modern medicine will suffice. Digitalis lanata was the original powder of the leaves of that plant used by William Withering to treat dropsy (oedema) successfully. Even when we were students in the 1950s we used to have powder digitalis. This had a wide range of therapeutic and toxic doses. Now we have taken the extracts and modified versions like digoxin, digitoxin and many other reductionist forms. Their therapeutic-toxic range is so narrow that a small overdose results in serious side effects! The good effect is the same as the leaf. The conventional randomised controlled studies (RCTs) with surrogate end points are also unscientific. We must innovate to have patient outcome studies instead. This is a good move by the western drug companies although for wrong reasons. I welcome the move.

“While science critics might have consumers believe the words biotechnology, sustainability, environment and industry together make strange bedfellows, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) shares with manufacturers and consumers information that shows the worlds can commingle.”          Anon.