A search for miracles

Vegetarian Times, Nov, 1998 by Suzanne Gerber, Cristin Marandino

Hidden among the rain forest's thousand-year-old fronds and vines may lie the evasive cures to cancer and AIDS. Unearthing them is her story.

The locals down in the Peruvian Amazon may not be aware of it, but "rain forest" has become quite the buzzword up in this neck of the woods. Mega fund-raising concerts and CDs, an entire branch of ecotravel, even ice cream and candy products all slap on rain forest labels. An Internet search turns up at least a thousand entries containing the words. But stop your average Joe on the street and ask him why we should care about it, and he might mumble something about global warming.

It's true: The 2 billion acres of rain forest that form a fertile ring around the equator do function like the earth's lungs, regulating planetary climate by absorbing huge amounts of deadly carbon dioxide. And the vast destruction of the rain forest in this century, along with the rise in fossil fuel usage, is a major contributing factor in global warming.

As dangerous as that is, it's still only part of an even larger problem. The rain forests are home to roughly 50 percent of the planet's 300,000 species of plants, yet only half of 1 percent of them have been carefully analyzed for their medicinal potential. When you realize that a quarter of all the pharmaceutical drugs sold in the United States are based on chemicals from just 40 plant species, you get a sense of what's being overlooked--or destroyed. As Gordon Cragg, chief of natural products for the National Cancer Institute (NCI), puts it, "Nature produces chemicals that no chemist would ever dream of at the lab bench."

Despite all the efforts to save the rain forest, a chunk the size of Denmark is slashed and burned each year; today, less than half of the world's original rain forest remains. Says Paul Alan Cox, Ph.D., one of the world's preeminent botanists, "Every time we destroy rain forest, we destroy plants we don't even know yet, and with them go the hope for medicinals."

Cox is one of the many ethnobotanists who make the rain forest their laboratory and serve as a bridge between the plants, indigenous peoples and Western culture. Most share the same missions: to help the locals find sustainable alternatives to burning the forest for quick cash from greedy loggers or developers; to pass along the traditional healing knowledge that's being cast aside for a more modern lifestyle; and to continue the search, deep in the rain forest, for cures for diseases ranging from cancer to malaria to diabetes to AIDS.

Scores of pioneers dedicate their lives to the pursuit of these goals; in these pages we take a close look at five of the most influential. Whether a Harvard-trained scientist, corporate executive or holistic healer, each is on a personal crusade to use the rain forest to save the rain forest.