Nobel Prize goes to modest woman who beat malaria for China
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
There was also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213 earlier today, which turns out to have been her 2011 paper, though few of us seem to have recognized it.
Edit: there's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856.
Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?
Hopefully some would show the true effect to the human beings
The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that "traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be ineffective.
The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.
In fact this woman's discovery is exactly that because the malaria parasite is already developing resistance to it which is why the recommended therapy combines it with other drugs to prevent a resistant strain from spreading. That doesn't belittle her accomplishment by any means, but if you stop to check under rocks you'll occasionally find some money hidden there. Doesn't mean we can find billions in free $$$ by sending an army of people out into the world to turn stones.
Much like pyrethrin-based insecticides, this chemical is already being studied and modified in an attempt to discover variants that are easier to make, have fewer side effects, or which organisms can't develop resistance against quite as easily.
I really like this analogy!
India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Knowledge_Digital_....
China: research into TCM happens a lot, even in Western laboratories
Amazonian and African plants are cataloged and analyzed for the pharmacological properties. I cannot name specific research projects, but plenty of books from respectable sources can be found. When traveling the Amazon I even met some pharmacologists who scout for plants (all but one working for pharmaceutical companies).
Unfortunately the alternative healing movement got a 20 or 30 year head-start and thus the hardest part for the interested amateur pharmacologist is filtering out all the pseudo-scientific publications in that field. It's not all bad, a lot is even useful as a starting point for serious research, but hard facts are hard to come by.
I don't think it's really meaningful to say that. To start with, what do you mean by "alternative healing movement"? The label didn't start being used until the latter half of the 1900s. But many of the practice and of course many of the inspirations are a lot older.
On the other hand, ethnobotanists have been cataloging pharmacological properties for over a century. Indeed, this Nobel Prize is for similar research done in the 1960s, so to say 'a 20 or 30 year head-start' would be to say the alternative healing movement started doing this no later than the 1940s.
The confounding problem is that herbalism is a much older practice, with a recorded history stretching back 1000s of years. When did the alternative healing movement not use herbalism?
I don't know enough about the history to really clear things up, but I can point to the 1987 essay on various aspects of the traditional medicinal aspects of celery - http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v8p164y1985.pdf - to show that it's hard to say that the modern alternative healing movement added anything new to the long and world-wide herbalist tradition.
Yes, I am referring to the group(s) that applied that label to themselves, not to herbalists as a whole, but to groups that elevated wishful thinking and superstition to "facts". They always had cures for aids, cancer or you-name-it, based on "nobody of the natives who used the plant ever had it" (reality: were never diagnosed because they never saw a doctor).
I am talking about the groups that give every scientific mind the creeps and that harmed traditional medicine by putting it into the esoteric corner. But as I said, even these groups added some value - if only by collecting hints at useful plants and their applications that can serve as a starting point for further (actual) research.
My personal low was a Swiss "healer" who attributed the pain-killing effect of cloves to their shape - the discussion turned really nasty when I pointed her at Eugenol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenol).
The personal highlight was the Moroccan herbalist in Fez, who knew the limits of what he can do, knew the pharmacology (to some degree) behind his plants and always could explain why they did things the way they did (and it's not "because tradition"...)
For example, "Ethobotany of the Tewa Indians" (1916) at http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-1.pdf starts:
> ETHNOBOTANY is virtually a new field of research, a field which, if investigated thoroughly and systematically, will yield results of great value to the ethnologist and incidentally also to the botanist. Ethnobotany is a science, consequently scientific methods of study and investigation must be adopted and adhered to as strictly as in any of the older divisions of scientific work. It is a comparatively easy matter for one to collect plants, to procure their names from the Indians, then to send the plants to a botanist for determination, and ultimately to formulate a list of plants and their accompanying Indian names, with some notes regarding their medicinal and other uses. ...
> Ethnobotanical research is concerned with several important questions: (a) What are primitive ideas and conceptions of plant life? (b) What are the effects of a given plant environment on the lives, customs, religion, thoughts, and everyday practical affairs of the people studied ? (c) What use do they make of the plants about them for food, for medicine, for material culture, for ceremonial purposes? ....
http://www.swsbm.com/Ethnobotany/Tewa_Ethnobotany-2.pdf has more details about specific applications.
So you can see already by this time scientists were collecting this sort of information.
IMO a real boon for medicine will be increasing sophisticated personal monitoring and the data this makes accessible to the world when shared. If sure we'll see some amazing cause/effect relationships from all sort of areas being identified in coming years .
Who knows, its possible the objectors are being political, or biased, but some people contest her getting all the recognition when there was a team with other prominent researchers, and that's unfortunate.
This seems to be the standard call for every science prize these days. I wonder if the Nobel committee will ever change their rules so they can start giving prizes to teams rather than 2-3 individuals.
Why not give the prize to a whole university, since the researchers couldn't do it without the admin staff and the students? Or to the whole country of taxpayers?
Awarding the prize in chemistry or physics or medicine to a country seems like it would dilute the award beyond recognition.
I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think.
I wont say the traditional Chinese herbal medicine is absolutely crap as some of current wonderful medicine is the extraction of plant.
So while it's not 'really dumb' to discount any traditional medicine because it wasn't made by a profit-driven multi-national corporation, it perhaps indicates some naivete regarding the provenance of many current 'modern' medicines. Some casual reading on digitalis, neem, cinchona, and willow bark may be enlightening -- most people on the planet, including you, have almost definitely used at least one of those (or, I'll concede, a synthesized version of the active chemicals taken from those plants).
There's some great resources on the net that speak to the role of plants in modern medicine - apart from the story you just read - keep in mind how many $'s have been spent over the past hundred years trying to come up with a synthetic cure for malaria.
It's the other way around - most of the drugs we have are reverse-engineered plants. But there's nothing nature can do that we can't do better once we know how it works. What we do is, we take from nature the parts that actually do the healing and refine them, and we throw away the irrelevant rest.
The reason some old herbal cures may be worth looking for is that it's likely that there is yet another plant-based substance that we could turn into actual, much more powerful medicine.
"Plant extracts, including willow bark and spiraea, of which salicylic acid was the active ingredient, had been known to help alleviate headaches, pains, and fevers since antiquity. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates (circa 460 – 377 BC), left historical records describing the use of powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help these symptoms.In 1763, Edward Stone, at Oxford, isolated the active ingredient of aspirin in his discovery of salicylic acid."
We lose a lot when the oceans and rain forests are destroyed beyond repair including chemical compounds, proteins, and processes that have taken eons to evolve which we have not yet discovered.
How important to medicine are the ancient remedies derived from poppy and coca leaves?
On the flip side, there is this essential oil, naturopath movement posting things on my Facebook stream about how tea tree oil is a natural antibiotic and to use it on everything. Unfortunately, tea tree oil is effective against MRSA which is now developing resistance to it because of careless overuse by the natural health community. There are dozens of products at Whole Foods that contain it but not at therapeutic levels so one of two things are happening, first, people are killing bacteria on their skin which for the most part is beneficial and, second, bad bacteria is developing resistance.
Consider how the original discovery of a poison is made the hard way. It's morbid to think, but someone probably died to figure out that some plants are poisonous. Now extend that to thousands of herbs that may treat pain such as weed or may treat gout. Its not an efficient process but there was an observer that recorded the data when someone took a herb. That observer may not have recorded the data but s/he may spread it by word. This is sort of like an expert that gives small weights to its neighbors in a training group. So over time and through many iterations (sort of like a training group that iterates through many cycles), some final accumulated "common truth" is collected. That is analogous to a fuzzy logic or probability in whether a herbal medicine may work.
But that's with only 1 herb. Even with just 1000 herbs, a 2 herb combination is already half a million. You see how inefficient that is? Even with over 6000 years of human history, the trial and error is still very limited in drug exploration. So just because theres no recorded data of the tests that it doesn't mean it can't work.
Today in China, almost everyone still uses traditional medicines. It's a massive national problem. They use them for minor diseases like colds and coughs and continue to believe they're effective because "I took the medicine and a few days later I recovered". The medicine companies are ripping off uneducated poor people and the "medicine" doesn't deserve any respect other than as a source of compounds to test using actual science. The scam is reinforced by doctors in hospitals who often prescribe a combination of traditional and modern medicine so that the modern medicine does the work while the (sometimes more expensive) traditional medicine leaves an opportunity for the patient to credit it instead.
Some of these herbs might work, but I imaging it's all do to the Placebo Effect.
If uneducated people want to ingest herbs--I really don't care. The problem is these people are killing Tigers, Bears, Rhinos, etc. falsely believing they will be cured of their alignment.
These people need to be educated. I am really bothered when I see another animal killed out of absolute ignorance, and tradition.(an unexamined tradition is just a folk tale?)
A well done double blind study is beautiful. We can argue about standard deviations, etc, but the studies need to be done.
Herbs great! Just leave animals out of the mystical cures.
Maybe we have different definitions of "unscientific". It doesn't mean the same as "works well".
> just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work.
No, that just means they are unscientific.
If we want people to stop treating science like magic, we need to stop conflating "effective", "natural", and "is consistent with scientific findings" with "scientific".
If your experiments are not reproducible, it's not scientific. If the experiments and observations don't deal with sufficiently precise measurements (no '3 pinches of this'), it's not scientific. If it can't be tested with prediction, experimentation, and observation, it's not scientific.
That's not to say it's wrong or that collective discovery isn't a thing. It's just not science. This is important because collective memory can be right, but it can be wrong. Folk medicine says things like "pregnant women should eat protein to have a boy" and "rhino horn cures diseases of the pancreas". We need a way to collectively vet these hypotheses. That's what the scientific method is for.
Some of them have effects such as lowering or increasing your blood pressure, for example, and that's everyday herb teas from the supermarkets. Not a problem if you drink one or two cups (most effects are small), and not a problem if you're not vulnerable. But if it's all you drink.. well.
No, you're in the right direction. The difference between a folk remedy and medicine is a lot of scientific inquiry, peer review, and reproduction of results. It's an error to lump folk remedies in with scientific findings. That's not to say folk remedies don't work; it's to say we don't have much objective proof that they work.
I'm fine with making objective proof (through hypothesis testing, precise measurement, reproducible results, etc.) my threshold for acceptance.
> there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think
Certainly. We should say, "Wow. That's worth some scientific inquiry to see if and how it works."
It's not worth cutting corners on this stuff. Some plants interact with medication or affect fetal development. We need experimentation and trials to rule out negative effects as well as prove positive results.