I remember seeing an advertisment in National Geographic Magazine as a kid, the image was of a tropical jungle in Costa Rica showing a forest with a single pink periwinkle and the ad copy talked about the idea we must preserve theese great forests because chemicals in things like rare periwinkels have chemicals that may be useful in fighting cancer.

So what hapened with that? Cancer is no more surable now than it was in 1900, we are jsut ablke to detect is faster, but the long term prognosis after cancer treatment really has not changed, it's ten years.

So, little or no progress. But what did happen with that pink Costga Rican floweer in the forest. Well, the ad implies throught the forests of Costa Rica are plants that cure cancer and all we have to do is isolate the substance and make it.

Therein lies the flaw. Ok say they found a plant that had a chemical that fought cancer. Now what? Well, if it dud just that then you could use that, we could cultivate it and there you go.

Nut that was never the plan. There's a catch. Just finding a sugstance in nature that fights or even aggresiviely fights cancer is worh - not a whole lot - if you can't patent it. And you can't patent a chemical that edxists in nature already, you can only patent man made chemicals. For 17 years in the US.

Many natuve cultues have treatments that fight cancer, it's not possible to go through life without meeting a few and while abundant ancdotal evidence exists no studies are made on these, for lack or a better work, roots and shoots. Furthermore they exist as traditional or tribal remedies and at this point you have to wonder perhaps if the pharmecitical company that can afford to run a full page ad in a color magazine with internationalk distributiuon is really the best source of this sort of thing. Perhaps there's a chance better, or even some answers can be founf in nature as the ad suggested but maybe patent medicine companies aren't the best ones to be looking into this, they're not doctors, they're acountants and lawyers.

In contrast, folk remedies that exist throughtout the world, Amerindian, Asian, African, European are not often shared between cultures but this is where the real potential exists. Of these many and varied substance that science is only now starting to odentify and explain, some are going to work better than others and in different ways and on different types iof cancer in different places in the body.

So, the purpoiose of this book is to review the various treatments from aroudn the world and look at the possability of a "super cocktail" that woujld perform as well if not better than contemprary chemoitherapy. Oh, and the drugs from periwionkles? Never panned out they say, because none of these compounds were patentable the interest dropped to zero nearly overnight. Richard Coniff summarized it welll in his blog:

It was also too good to be true. In 2008, Merck quietly abandoned its search for new drugs from the natural world, shifting its attention to synthetic compounds and vaccines instead. Then last year, as if to mark the anniversary of its Costa Rican folly, the company gave away its entire library of natural compounds—100,000 extracts representing 60 percent of all known plant genera, ready to be screened for the next big miracle drug. And it wasn’t just Merck: Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and most other Big Pharma companies have also abandoned the direct search for drugs from the natural world. “We lived under the assumption that the rainforest was full of medicinally useful compounds like vincristine,” says James Miller, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden. Derived from a plant in Madagascar, the rosy periwinkle, that drug had turned leukemia and lymphoma into survivable diseases. “And nobody found the next vincristine.”

Miller holds out hope that drugs from the natural world may yet have their day. But bioprospecting since the Merck deal has so far failed to produce a single new blockbuster drug. Instead of the widely anticipated golden age of drug discovery, new drug approvals over the past decade have sunk to a 25-year low. Nor has any major drug contributed revenues to the preservation of the habitat from which it was originally derived. On the contrary the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species says 64 plant species are currently threatened by overharvesting for medicinal uses.