More than 80% of the developed world's diet originated from the rainforest and this empirical indigenous knowledge of the wealth of edible fruits, vegetables and nuts. Of the estimated 3,000 edible fruits found in the rainforest, only 200 are cultivated for use today, despite the fact that the Indians use more than 1,500.
This indigenous use of the plants provides the bioprospector with the necessary clues to target specific species to research in the race for time before the species are lost to deforestation. More often the race is defined as to be the first company to patent a new drug utilizing a newly discovered rainforest phytochemical, and of course, profits for the pharmaceutical companies.
Laboratory syntheses of new medicines is increasingly costly and not as fruitful as companies would like. In the words of one major drug company: "Scientists may be able to make any molecule they can imagine on a computer, but Mother Nature...is an infinitely more ingenuous and exciting chemist."
Scientists have developed new technologies to assess the chemical makeup of plants and they realize using medicinal plants identified by Indians makes research more efficient and less expensive. With these new trends, drug development has actually returned to its roots - traditional medicine.
It is now understood by bioprospectors that tribal people of the rainforest represent the key to finding new and useful tropical forest plants. The degree to which they understand and are able sustainably to use this diversity is astounding.
The Barasan Indians of Amazonian Columbia can identify all of the tree species in their territory without having to refer to the fruit or flowers, a feat that no university-trained botanist is able to accomplish! A single Amazonian tribe of Indians may use over 200 species of plants for medicinal purposes alone.
Of the 121 pharmaceutical drugs that are plant-derived today, 74% were discovered through follow up research to verify the authenticity of information concerning the ethnic medical uses of the plant. Nevertheless, to this day, very few rainforest tribes have been subjected to a complete ethnobotanical analysis. Robert Goodland of the World Bank wrote,
"Indigenous knowledge is essential for the use, identification and cataloguing of the [tropical] biota. As tribal groups disappear, their knowledge vanishes with them. The preservation of these groups is a significant economic opportunity for the [developing] nation, not a luxury."
Since Amazonian Indians are often the only ones who know both the properties of these plants and how they can best be used, their knowledge is now being considered an essential component of all efforts to conserve and develop the rainforest.
Since failure to document this lore would represent a tremendous economic and scientific loss to the industrialized world, the bioprospectors are now are working side by side with the rainforest tribal shamans and herbal healers to learn the wealth of their plant knowledge. But bioprospecting has a dark side. Indian knowledge that has resisted the pressure of "modernization" is being used by bioprospectors who, like oil companies and loggers destroying the forests, threaten to leave no benefits behind them.
Its a noble idea, the ethnobotanist who works with the Indians seeking a cure for cancer or even AIDS, like Sean Connery in the movie, Medicine Man. Yet, behind this lurks a system that, at its worst, steals the Indian knowledge to benefit CEOs, stockholders and academic careers and reputations.
The real goal of these powerful bio-prospectors is to target novel and active phytochemicals with medical applications, synthesize them in a laboratory and have them patented for subsequent drug manufacture and resulting profits.
In an article published in Economic Botany, Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University, and Dr. Michael J. Balick, director of the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Gardens, estimate the minimum number of pharmaceutical drugs potentially remaining to be extracted from the rainforests is staggering. Furthermore, they estimate that there are at least 328 new drugs that still await discovery in the rainforest with a potential value of $3-4 billion to a private pharmaceutical company and as much as $147 Billion to society as a whole.
Will the indigenous tribes reap the benefits of these wonderful new medicines? As corporations rush to patent indigenous medicinal knowledge, the originating indigenous populations have been long forgotten.