Extinction of Medicinal Plant Species
Because "over 50% of prescription drugs are derived from chemicals first identified in plants," a 2008 report from the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (representing botanic gardens in 120 countries) warned that "cures for things such as cancer and HIV may become 'extinct before they are ever found'." They identified 400 medicinal plants at risk of extinction from over-collection and deforestation, threatening the discovery of future cures for disease. These included Yew trees (the bark is used for the cancer drug paclitaxel); Hoodia (from Namibia, a potential source of weight loss drugs); half of Magnolias (used as Chinese medicine for 5,000 years to fight cancer, dementia and heart disease); and Autumn crocus (for gout). Their report said that "five billion people still rely on traditional plant-based medicine as their primary form of health care."
Read more about this topic: Botanicals
Famous quotes containing the words extinction of, extinction, medicinal, plant and/or species:
“War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“[T]he asphaltum contains an exactly requisite amount of sulphides for production of rubber tires. This brown material also contains “ichthyol,” a medicinal preparation used externally, in Webster’s clarifying phrase, “as an alterant and discutient.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)