> Like many of his predecessors, Reverend Stone believed that the remedy to a malady could be found close to the cause. That is, if people were becoming sick in a certain place, there should be a plant or other remedy nearby.

Huh, this paragraph caught me - I was recently involved with a group using large-scale environmental metagenomic sampling to try to find good candidates for a drug discovery pipeline. The working theory was that bacteria use chemicals to fight off attackers, and if the bacteria was going to produce potentially lethal amounts of a substance designed to kill other bacteria, it would need a "sink" for that substance as well, and that would likely be co-located in the genome (so when the gene for the dangerous chemical gets activated, its sink is likely to get activated as well) - so, find something in the metagenomic library that looks like the substance causing you problems, and then look nearby for something that might be a cure. Funny to revisit this kind of observational thinking from a more modern perspective.