Professor who harnessed power of cactuses is a top inventor | Hacker News Reader

Professor who harnessed power of cactuses is a top inventor

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164 pointstareqak64 comments

It means there has to be so many other undiscovered use of things that only the old and experienced know about.

How about herbal medicine? Other household remedies? How about these things from a very different living environment and culture?

I believe we shouldn't just dismiss the old remedies and other tricks.

like snake oil ?

"A full 40 percent of the drugs behind the pharmacist’s counter in the Western world are derived from plants that people have used for centuries, including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs in the United States today. For example, quinine extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree (Cinchona calisaya) relieves malaria, and licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra) has been an ingredient in cough drops for more than 3,500 years." https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/inde...

A full 100% of the drugs sold today are manufactured using only ingredients found in nature! <sarcasm>

(I'm aware of the sarcasm tag). Technically that 100% should be 99.999%. Not all drugs are found in nature. Technetium, a man-made compound, is used in some radiology. https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT001978

No, technetium is still a natural product, it just takes a little processing. An organic miner dug up some raw uranium ore, then someone refined it, irradiated it, and isolated the resulting molybdenum-99, and finally a radiologist extracts the all-natural technetium from the decay process of that molybdenum.

Natural = found in nature.

You can argue that, and I might agree with it, but it's not regulated as such.

It is found in nature, it just has a slightly different number of protons when it's raw.

I know what you mean, but it's just the definition of natural at least on our "earth". If you find some technetium somewhere let me know.

Medical errors are the third leading cause of death. We like to imagine we’ve come a long way from treating ghosts in your blood with cocaine, but we haven’t.

https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139

That's a very misleading summary. "Leading causes of death could be prevented by more perfect medical response" is a better summary.

“Leading causes of death” being medical incompetence, which is the third largest cause of death in the US

"we shouldn't dismiss" means we should try them and see if they work, not just automatically assume they work or automatically dismiss them as snake oil.

>I believe we shouldn't just dismiss the old remedies and other tricks.

We test many of those remedies and tricks with a formal method. The ones that work further science and our collective understanding. The ones that don't are relegated as old wives tales.

Even the article narrows in on this correctly.

>Alcantar told her postdoc about this, and because they didn’t have a lab, directed him to try “a quick and dirty experiment.”

>“Two days later he came back and said ‘Yeah, it worked,’” she said.

Yes I agree, the ones that work are packaged, labeled and sold at a high profit as Pharmaceuticals.

Typically, the ones that work are quickly synthesized and a method that can be patented is developed. Then the plant is scheduled and kept illegal so that you have to pay the pharma for something that grows naturally.

I'm always surprised by the vitriol directed at Biotech on HN. Isolating and enhancing the effect of a natural substance along with ensuring dosage typically requires quite a large amount of engineering effort. Why shouldn't that be patented? I think we can all agree that swallowing a tablet of aspirin is better than extracting your own from a willow tree.

There's lots of things to not like about big pharma. How much money has big pharama spent on lobbying congress to keep certain plants scheduled so they can maintain their stockholders? The stories on big pharma and their role in the opioid crisis, stories on big pharma pricing structures that are not the same depending on who/where you are even though there's no difference in the pill. The agressive nature of pill pushing (even non-opiods) on doctors. The aggressive nature of advertising to desperate patients to pressure their doctors to prescribe medication that won't actually help but may worsen situations.

I think the vitriol is because they profit scandalously from their efforts.

The ones that don't work may have just been experiments that were set up wrong, such as using the wrong plant, harvesting the wrong part of the plant, or otherwise ignoring parts of the herbalist lore that the experimenter thought weren't important. These are all things that happen.

And some herbalism is just bunk, sure. But a failure to reject the null hypothesis isn't "final". It just means that experiment didn't work.

Not everything is easy to test. Not all herbalism, home remedies, etc. are described well; not all practitioners actually understand how it works even if it does work. (And sometimes experimenters test the purported mechanism, rather than the claimed effect, which is just silly.) All of these things can interfere with the transition from folklore to formal methods.

Yes as long as we never prescribe a remedy because we believe it works but because we know it works, anything else is fine.

We can even find drugs in dreams, for all we care, as long as we test them later.

Now can you explain me why homeopathy and acupuncture still exist ? They just dont hurt, but they cure nothing.

I would have more confidence in Big Pharma if it wasn't an industry driven by profits, but for public good.

Look at ketamine vs esketamine, for example: "Why isn’t ketamine an approved depression treatment, then? It comes down to profits. Ketamine’s patent expired in 2002, meaning that further studies into the drug would not bring any financial returns to the companies funding them." [1]

I think it would make sense that there are also natural remedies that may be available, and cheap for consumers, but simply aren't considered because they would not be profitable. It's not worth it for them to look into these natural remedies if they can't put a patent on them and make money. Big Pharma, being primarily for profit, would even have an incentive to discredit these natural remedies, as it could harm their business.

[1] https://qz.com/1889308/why-isnt-ketamine-approved-as-an-anti...

This is what I came here to say, very much agree. I frequently have the experience of going to examine.com or Cochrane Collaboration for info on more natural remedies and see that we just don’t have enough science on them to know.

Feels like the kind of market failure that could be solved by foundations, government funding, or legislated incentives to pharma

Saponins are a well known type of substances. It was created as predators deterrent but we can use if as predator's detergent. There is even a tree that bears soap berries, so you don't need to kill any poor cactus or use animal fat for that. First course of plant physiology.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology...

Q: Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works?

A: Medecine.

I think many old remedies have been tested and then get refined to work better. Willow bark was used for thousands of years as pain relief but now those chemicals found in the bark have been refined into aspirin.

The example from folk medicine I like is Ergot. It comes from a fungus, was used by midwives for hundreds of years, and scientists investigating its derivatives in the late 30s / early 40s is what lead to LSD's discovery.

I have an uncle in his 70s. The other day he gave me some shrubbery to chew on coz of a toothache. I was like yeah-yeah let me humour him. Shock on me! The thing worked! Numbs the pain. In fact, any part of the tongue had a numbed feeling similar to the feeling you get when the dentist injects you.. I believe there’s probably a lot one can learn from the connected with nature older folks

And we likely have learned from this! The plant likely had something like Menthol (from various mint) or Eugenol (clove, nutmeg, basil, etc) [0]. Both of these are examples of items where we found and isolated the compounds responsible for the desirable effects. Both of these are used as mild local anesthetics.

Or he gave you some coca leaves to chew on since cocaine was one of the first really strong local anesthetics. A lot modern anesthetics are synthesized but based on the structure of cocaine, but without that pesky drug addiction and nasty side effects. This includes lidocaine, which what they do typically use at the dentist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_anesthetic#Naturally_der...

Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for rediscovering artemisinin, a anti-malaria treatment, from a 1,600-year-old text and scientifically formalizing it.

The medical handbook that first describes the formula (including the fact that you need to use low-temperature water) was written in the year 340. That's not a typo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_Hong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou

Always listen to your grandma.

Most people understand their parents' generation fairly well, but there is a lot of knowledge in generations further removed from our own that generally gets dismissed. That's not to say we should easily believe things from the past without evidence, but there's merit looking into and formally testing old ideas.

Boomers recommend cow urine in my country for any disease. Very knowledgeable.

How very early 18th century.

Listening to just anybody and acting on it is probably not going to end up well. But a lot of things relegated to the past are yet to be re-"discovered" by pharma and made large profits out of them because using them as natural remedies is not very profitable.

Running large scale medical experiments on humans is costly. Vote for your tax dollars to do the research. But that doesn’t mean grandma has sufficient credibility about medicinal claims to warrant “always listen to your grandma”.

My grandma tells me that a draft in my apartment will make me catch a cold.

If only there was a method for differentiating old nonsense from advice that actually works... A scientific one, even?

That one is super popular in my family. I wonder if it's related to allergies; I sometimes get stuffed up with a fan blowing on me overnight.

If I sleep with a slight breeze on my face, I will sometimes wake up with a mild sore throat. There can be half truths in these types of beliefs.

That's probably related to low humidity.

That's probably related to the pathogens carried by the draft too. We don't know.

Maybe use the toddler infinite "why" trick.

A steady stream of cold air coming into your apartment might introduce an airborne virus from outside while the cold weather may hinder your immune system from doing its job as effectively? haha that sounds impossible! stupid grandma!

See this Stack Exchange question. The answers do link some papers.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/88/does-being-c...

My grandmother tells me that fans left on will kill me while i sleep.

Is she Korean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

The older ones could: an old style electric motor when on but stuck, can catch fire[1]. That's the nightmare, waking up to a full blown fire.

[↑]https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/hazardupdate.pdf

To be clear, it's about suffocating because the fan uses up the air in the room, or some such nonsense.

There is a lot of superstition in the world, not just among old people (and not just Koreans). The issue is most don't critically question the things they believe in. Especially when there are many others around them who say the same thing. Rationalists will always be contrarians.

The fan thing sounds silly, but it does make a lot of sense to look into more realistic ideas from the past or the present, even and maybe especially when the mainstream doesn't subscribe to them.

Gen-Z as Grandma's: say words of affirmation to the water to make it happy before you drink it. breathwork moaning ensues

> Sometimes, if the water was dirty, she’d boil it with part of a cactus plant. Alcantar questioned how adding something gooey would help.

Isn't this just clarifying? Like adding egg whites to clarify red wine or aspic. The same process (usually egg whites, but also some other gooey substances) is used to extract impurities from a lot of things.

The technical term is flocculation, but yes it's ultimately the same process. Cacti just happen to be a very cheap, commercially available source of large amounts of mucilage.

Cacti is a plural of cactus.

Sure, in Latin. Cactus is (also) an English word and thus its plural is cactuses.

English intuition tells me I would use 'Cacti' when talking about cactus in general terms. 'Cactuses' would be appropriate when referring to a specific instance of multiple cactuses.

you could probably also get away with a phrase like "look at all this cactus" or "this hill is full of cactus"

I'm not sure if it's correct, but it sounds correct.

That is how most of my friends use the word "cactus" in Arizona.

That is correct, at least descriptively. For instance, I will routinely hear this like "There's a lot of sequoia up North" or "That forest is now full of eucalyptus".

In English the plural is cacti, with cactuses and cactus also accepted. In general, trying to treat English as a rule-based language, not an amalgamation of special cases, will result in mistakes. Like “gooses”, “passerbies”, “milleniums”, “datas”, “childs”, “criterions”, “foots”, “mans”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cactus

If OP said "cacti is also accepted" I would agree. Instead OP said "cactuses is wrong" which is what I take issue with.

Ummm....

OP (or rather GP) said "Cacti is a plural of cactus."

You replied with "Cactus is (also) an English word and thus its plural is cactuses."

Only one of you made an assertion that implied that there was only one correct answer.

That seems like an overly-close reading of GP. I don't think they would pointing out the other pluralization of cactus unless they thought there was something off about the one the article uses.

Better an overly close reading (which I think is actually correct) than the one in which you literally misquoted their words inside quote marks.

I typically say “cactopodes”

My eyes getting so bad. I read the title as top investor instead top inventor.

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