It is estimated that nearly half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and micro-organisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to Rainforest deforestation. Harvard's Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist, Edward O. Wilson, estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day. That's 50,000 species a year! Again, why should we in the United States be concerned about the destruction of distant tropical rain forests? Because rain forest plants are complex chemical storehouses that contain many undiscovered biodynamic compounds with unrealized potential for use in modern medicine. We can gain access to these materials only it we study and conserve the species that contain them. Rainforests currently provide sources providing one-fourth of today's medicines, and 70% of the plants found to have anti-cancer properties are found only in the rainforest. The Rainforest and it's immense undiscovered biodiversity holds the key to unlocking tomorrow's cures for devastating diseases. How many cures to devastating disease have we already lost?
Two drugs obtained from a rainforest plant known as the Madagascar periwinkle, now extinct in the wild due to deforestation of the Madagascar rainforest, has increased the chances of survival for children with leukemia from 20 percent to 80 percent. Think about it - 8 out of 10 children are now saved rather than 8 of 10 children dying from leukemia. How many children have been spared and how many more will continue to be spared because of this single rainforest plant? What if we failed to discover this one important plant among millions before it was extinct due to man's destruction? When our remaining rainforests are gone, the rare plants, animals will be lost forever and so will their possible cures to diseases like cancer.
No one can challenge the fact that man is still largely dependant on plants for treating his aliments. Almost 90 percent of people in developing countries still rely on traditional medicine--based largely on species of plants and animals--for their primary health care. In the United States, some 25 percent of prescriptions are filled with drugs whose active ingredients are extracted or derived from plants. Sales of these plant-based drugs in the U.S. amounted to some $4.5 billion in 1980. Worldwide sales of these plant-based drugs were estimated at $40 billion in 1990. Still even more drugs are derived from animals and microorganisms. Currently 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant derived sources from only 90 species of plants.
The U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified over 3,000 plants that are active against cancer cells, and 70% of these plants are found only in the rainforest. Today, over 25% of the active ingredients in today's cancer-fighting drugs come from organisms found only in the Rainforest. Among the thousands of species of rainforest plants that have not been analyzed, are many more thousands of unknown plant chemicals, many of which have evolved to protect the plants from pathogens. These plant chemicals may well help us in our own constant struggle with constantly evolving pathogens such as evolving bacteria-resistant pathogens in tuberculosis, measles, and HIV. Experts now believe that if there is a cure for cancer and even AIDS, it will probably be found in the rainforest.
In 1983, there were no U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers involved in research programs to discover new drugs or cures from plants. Today, over 100 pharmaceutical companies and several branches of the US government, including giants like Merck, Abbott, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Monsanto, SmithKline Beecham and the National Cancer Institute are engaged in plant-based research projects for possible drugs and cures for viruses, infections, cancer and AIDS. Most of this research is currently taking place in the rainforest in an industry that is now called "bio-prospecting." This new pharmacological industry has sprung up, drawing together an unlikely confederacy: plant-collectors and anthropologists; ecologists and conservationists; natural product companies and nutritional supplement manufacturers, AIDS and cancer researchers; executives in the world's largest drug companies, and native indigenous shamans. They are part of a radical experiment - to preserve the world's rainforests by showing how much more valuable they are standing than cut down. And it is a race against a clock whose every tick means another acre of charred forest. Yet it is also a race that pits one explorer against another, for those who score the first big hit in chemical bio-prospecting will secure wealth and a piece of scientific immortality.
In November 1991, Merck Pharmaceutical Company announced a landmark agreement to obtain samples of wild plants and animals for drug-screening purposes from Costa Rica's National Biodiversity Institute (INBio). Spurred by this and other biodiversity prospecting ventures, interest in the commercial value of plant genetic and biochemical resources is burgeoning today. While the Merck-INBio agreement provides a fascinating example of a private partnership that contributes to rural economic development, rainforest conservation, and technology transfer, virtually no precedent exists for national policies and legislation to govern and regulate what amounts to a brand new industry.
Since wealth and technology are as concentrated in the North as biodiversity and poverty are in the South, the question of equity is particularly hard to answer in ways that satisfy everyone with a stake in the outcome. The interests of bioprospecting corporations are not the same as those of people who live in a biodiversity "hot spot," many of them barely eking out a living. As the search for wild species whose genes can yield new medicines and better crops gathers momentum, these rich habitats also sport more and more bio-prospectors. Like the nineteenth-century California gold rush or its present-day counterpart in Brazil, this "gene rush" could wreak havoc on ecosystems and the people living in or near them. Done properly, however, bioprospecting can bolster both economic and conservation goals while underpinning the medical and agricultural advances needed to combat disease and sustain growing populations.
The majority of our current plant-derived drugs were discovered through these traditional uses of plants by the indigenous people where they grew and flourished. History has shown that the rainforest is no different, and these bioprospectors now are working side by side with rainforest tribal shamans and herbal healers to learn the wealth of their plant knowledge and many uses of indigenous plants where drugs and pharmacies are virtually unknown.