Evolutionary trees of traditional medicine plants provide hints for drug-makers

There’s a bizarre mindset that divides medicine into “natural” (made from plants; untainted by villainous pharmaceutical companies; delivered to your veins by forest animals) and everything else (“man-made” pills fashioned from profits and poisons). The reality, of course, is that many of the drugs used in our hospitals and pharmacies come from plants. Willow bark contains salicylic acid, the main ingredient in aspirin. Paclitaxel (taxol) was isolated from the bark of the Pacific yew tree; today, it is used to stop cancer cells from dividing. The rose periwinkle has given us vinblastine and vincristine, both used to treat leukaemia. These examples scratch the surface of what the botanical world has given us, and what it might still offer. Of the tens of thousands of plants used in “traditional medicine”, a piddling proportion has been tested for chemicals with medical benefits. How do we find the rest? How do we go ...