Plants Hold the Keys to Medical Breakthroughs
More than 50% of the medicines we rely on today come from or are patterned after natural sources like plants and fungi.
This includes medicines that treat pain, fight bacterial infections, reduce inflammation, and even drugs critical to fighting many cancers. Aspirin, for example, is extracted from the bark of the White Willow Tree (Salix alba vulgaris). It’s been used since ancient Egyptian times when people chewed on the tree’s twigs to treat their aches and pains.
We got morphine from the Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum) and the anticoagulant coumadin from spoiled sweet clover (Melilotus species). The antimalarial drug artemisinin comes from Sweet Wormwood, and tropical plants like Madagascar, Rosy, and Periwinkle led to the creation of vinblastine, which revolutionized the treatment of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The history of humans turning to nature for medicine is long — pre-dating even written language. Beyond the Egyptians using willow bark over 3,000 years ago, we have evidence of people in India referring to plant medicine 5,000 years ago. Early writings on traditional Chinese medicine date back to the 15th century BC.
Many of the medicines we continue to use today are derived from plants. And this doesn’t account for the more than 60% of the world’s population that uses traditional medicines, which often come from medicinal plants. Much of the world collects and cultivates a variety of plants to meet their medicinal needs.
While modern medicine may increasingly use computer models and synthetic compounds to develop new drugs, chemists and biologists often still turn to plants as chemical templates. The natural world remains a crucial part of the drug discovery process, even if only serving as inspiration, by showing us compounds or genetic material that can treat various ailments.
Yet all of these practices are threatened when biodiversity is threatened. Every time we raze a habitat or allow invasive species to push out indigenous plants we aren’t just hurting those ecosystems — we’re hurting ourselves too. Every bit of biodiversity lost could be depriving us of another potentially life-saving medicine. Or, putting it differently, protecting complex ecosystems is in our best interest.
The effects of this are already being felt. Some research suggests that we are losing at least one important drug every two years due to this loss. If we fail to protect our global ecosystems, our health care, disease prevention efforts, and overall wellness will suffer.
