[David]

Originally Posted by fearn

Speaking as one of those scientists (I'm a trained botanist), there's this one little problem with that statement. It's incomplete.

Yes, few plants have been tested. There's a reason. Some plant families are rich in drug-type chemicals. The tomato family is a good example of this, and has given us atropine, scopalamine, nicotine, etc. Some families are not rich.

Basically, the are ~800 species of figs in the tropics, and there are hundreds of species of oaks. The chemistry of both groups is known fairly well, they're pretty consistent among species and they're not good sources for new drugs. I could go on at length, but the reason no one is checking the plants that we know about is because there's a very low probability that we'll find anything new in them.

Wade Davis is not neutral in this process. As an ethnobotanist, he has an interest in promoting bioprospecting, specifically by finding out what native tribes use as medicines, and then determining whether those plants work by some new chemistry, whether they work by some chemistry that's already known (the normal case), or whether they work by sympathetic magic (i.e. placebo) alone (also very common).

Bioprospecting goes in and out as a fad among drug companies. Right now, they're bioprospecting in the ocean and in animals, because they're finding new classes of pain killers (cone snails) and antibiotics (frogs, alligators, etc) to study. I'm sure that they will eventually go back to the rainforests, but even then, they're probably going to be looking at things like fungi, bacteria, and animals, as much as the plants.

I'm sorry to hear about your mother, but I'm not sure that the plants of the rain forests held any cure for her. That was definitely true for my late father, by the way.

Fearn, i am sorry to hear about your father as well. My post was a reaction to your statement that "It's all well and good to wish for a miracle drugs, but things like exercise and safe sex still work best". My mom was a very active woman who practiced yoga and went hiking all the time. She had a good, health, well balanced diet. Yet she battled breast cancer and was finally taken by leukemia. So i stand by my response that "exercise and safe sex" was not the answer there.
While i understand your comments that the not all plants are viable sources for drugs and that the 1% figure is therefore misleading there are so many species of plants in the Amazon that i am convinced that it is well worth the investigation. My worry is that by the time scientists get done with cone snail and "eventually go back to the rainforests" there nay not be any rainforests to go back to. They are disappearing at an amazing rate.