Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets

Plotkin expands here on his earlier work, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, by giving an overview of how plants and animals are being utilized to treat disease. Trained as an ethnobotonist (a scientist who studies how people use local plants), Plotkin has the ability to translate science into engrossing anecdotes that are accessible to the lay reader. And he's got good news: the natural world, he writes, has made and will continue to make enormous contributions to modern medicine. (Penicillin, he reminds us, was derived from a fungus.) He describes, for instance, the work of Dr. William Fenical, who developed a chemical from a soft coral that may prove useful in fighting cancer. Plotkin also provides an eye-opening account of the curative properties to be found in the sea, in insects, in snake venom and in plants. But he also delivers bad news: the promise of this vast natural pharmacopoeia is threatened by unchecked population growth, environmental depredation and the destruction of native cultures of tribal shamans (who, he points out, discovered the use of plants that have led to the development of ""everything from codeine for pain to quinine for malaria to podo-phyllotoxin for cancer""). A very interesting investigation into nature's medicine, this book also makes a strong case for conservation. Author tour. (Apr.)