No one comes to OIosega, Samoa, for a vacation. The isIand is a thin two miIes wide, with no hoteIs or restaurants. The viIIage store stocks six varieties of tinned corned beef and scant eIse. To get from the airstrip, you either waIk or make arrangements with the IocaI schooI bus driver. ItÍs cIassic Third WorId tropics: the rain comes in torrents; the shower, in trickles.
Few white foIk come to OIosega at aII. This morningÍs fIight, however, brings a motIey six-pack: Brigham Young University ethnobotanist PauI Cox, graduate student Will McClatchey, three undergraduates, and me. Cox and crew are here to look for native healers, called taulasea, who make medicine from indigenous plants. IÍm here to look for science. IÍd heard Cox give a lecture entitled ñShamans as Scientists,î in which he railed against Western science for its dismissal of native medicine as savage and crude. ñPeople equate science with technology,î heÍd said. ñTo do so is to confuse product with process. Native healers have a rigorous, sophisticated methodology.î
Ethnobotanists like Cox travel hither and yon--more yon than hither--making friends with local populations. ThatÍs why Cox is back in Samoa for the umpteenth time; Samoa has been good to him. On the island of Upolu in 1984, healers told him of a plant used to treat yellow fever. Cox sent it on to the National Cancer Institute, which isolated a powerful antiviral compound from it, named prostratin. Prostratin is now one of NCIÍs candidates for undergoing clinical trial as a possible AIDS therapy.
Were it not for CoxÍs confidence in the medical and botanical expertise of traditional healers, prostratin would not even have been considered for trial. Prostratin belongs to a group of compounds called phorbols, which are known tumor-promoters. ñI had to go into a closed session with the NCI Natural Products Branch,î says Cox, ñand say, ïLook, the Samoans have been dosing themselves with this stuff for hundreds of years. If it were causing tumors, theyÍd have picked up on it. At least test it.Í Finally they did, and it turned out actually to inhibit tumor growth.î (Cox believes that by making a tea from the plant, healers selectively extract a benign water-soluble phorbol.)
At the moment, science seems as remote a concept as room service and a hot shower. WeÍre sitting on palm mats in the home of the high talking chiefÍs family. Paul Cox, Harvard Ph.D. and Fulbright scholar, is dressed in a shocking-pink wraparound lavalava and a shell lei. He speaks in the loud, rubbery singsong of Samoan oratory. This is an arrival ceremony, and Cox is returning the welcoming rhetoric of the village chief.
