Bioprospecting relies on the variety of plant and animal life to solve medical problems.

When bioprospectors find a useful chemical, they collect as much of it as they can

Using technology to bioprospect is usually the easiest and fastest approach.

One approach to bioprospecting includes talking to people who use traditional medicines.

Rediscovering Old Cures

The world of medicine is changing rapidly. Scientists are learning more about the human body every day, and news stories about new vaccines, new medical devices, and new treatments are common. But modern researchers are looking backward as well as forward, re-examining traditional cures—and they are finding some surprises. Cultures from the Arctic to the Amazon and Siberia to the South Pacific have developed their own traditional cures—but the country with the oldest and biggest literature of documented medical observations is China. It is clear that there is still much to learn from traditional Chinese medicine.

The Chinese record of traditional medicine dates back 5,000 years, when healers began analyzing the body and describing its reactions to various treatments. The result is a vast amount of literature dealing with every health problem imaginable. These records are still useful in the modern era. Yung-Chi Cheng, a professor at Yale School of Medicine, tells the story of a Chinese chemist named Tu Youyou. In 1972, Tu announced the discovery of a drug to treat malaria, a serious condition spread by mosquitoes. Western researchers had tested more than 200,000 possible treatments for malaria, but Tu wondered if the answer might lie in classical Chinese medical texts. She tested several plants and found a remedy based on an herb called wormwood, mentioned in a text from the 4th century. The drug she created, based on this early text, is called artemisinin; it has saved millions of lives. Tu won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015.

Cheng has wondered what other old cures could be rediscovered. He has found one that may prove important in cancer treatment—a mixture of four herbs he calls PHY906. During the 1990s, Cheng noted that many patients stopped cancer treatment because it caused extreme sickness. He knew that Chinese medicine had many herbal treatments for sickness. His colleague Shwu-Huey Liu searched Yale’s collection of early Chinese medical texts. In an ancient book, she found an 1,800-year-old recipe for a mixture of herbs, which was described as a treatment for stomach illnesses.

Over the past 20 years, Cheng and his colleagues have worked with the National Cancer Institute in the U.S. to test this formula on cancer patients. Almost all experienced relief from stomach pain, but something else happened: Their tumors shrank faster than those of patients who hadn’t taken the herbal formula. “I didn’t expect that,” Cheng says. “So now the question is, why?” The answer seems to be in the way in which the herbs work together to produce macrophages—white blood cells that eat up cancer cells. Cheng has formed a company with his son, Peikwen, to market PHY906 and develop other herbal drugs.

One challenge faced by manufacturers of Chinese herbal medicines is gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. But while the FDA is reluctant to approve herbal drugs, the practice of combining modern and traditional medicine is spreading among consumers. When Western medicine doesn’t help, Americans increasingly turn to traditional treatments, which are often cheaper than doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals. A patient can read about a traditional remedy online, order the herbs online, and watch videos on how to prepare them at home.

Today, scientists from universities around the world are looking at traditional treatments for diseases such as cancer and diabetes. As the saying goes, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.” In other words, as you throw out old information that you don’t need, be careful not to throw out knowledge that can still be valuable.

1. What is the main idea of the passage?