Reviews 



A Quixotic Search for 

 New Drugs 



by J. Worth Estes 



According to Mark J. Plotkin, ethno- 

 botanists have three major goals. The first 

 is "to record and preserve the plant knowl- 

 edge of forest peoples"; the second is to 

 use their expertise to "benefit the tribes in 

 their dealings with the outside world"; 

 and, third, to possibly "uncover new, po- 

 tentially useful plant-based medicines." In 

 an engaging book, Plotkin recounts his ad- 

 ventures among tribes in Suriname, 

 Guyana, French Guiana, and Venezuela, 

 where for the first ten years of his career he 

 worked toward fulfilling these goals. The 

 third goal, finding plant-based medicines, 

 remains as elusive today as it was to the 

 first explorers of the Americas. 



The typical shaman of the Amazonian 

 rain forest is the village physician, phar- 

 macist, and psychiatrist, as well as media- 

 tor with the spirit world — at least in cul- 

 tural enclaves that have not been affected 



A Tirio Indian treats a child's ear 

 problem with a medicinal plant. 



Mark J. Plotkin; Conservation International 



62 Natural History 3/94 



by the advent of outsiders, such as mis- 

 sionaries or gold miners. In these commu- 

 nities, the young graduate student Plotkin 

 followed the pioneering footsteps of his 

 mentor, ethnobotanist and Harvard Uni- 

 versity professor Richard Evans Schultes, 

 and earned the trust of several shamans. 



Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An 

 Ethnobotanist Searches for New Med- 

 icines IN the Amazon Rain Forest, by 

 Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D., Viking, $22.00, 

 318 pp., illus. 



who willingly passed on detailed knowl- 

 edge of the plants they used in healing or 

 in communicating with the spirits of the 

 forests. 



Plotkin's tales permit the reader who 

 has never ventured into any rain forest, 

 much less eaten the rodent meats or taste- 

 less fruits that are part of the conventional 

 human diet there, to experience almost at 

 firsthand the hazards, as well as the plea- 

 sures, of studies with witch doctors. His 

 accounts of hacking his way through 

 Uanas thick and thin, of being soaked in 

 sweat and rain, of avoiding large crocodil- 

 ians, and of being bitten by vampire bats 

 are the stuff of adventure movies. His ac- 

 counts of how shamans strip tree bark and 

 make arrow poisons are the stuff of eth- 

 nobotany — as is Plotkin's quasi-mystical 

 story of how a Wayana shaman in French 

 Guiana treated his sore elbow. However, 

 one does wonder how Plotkin managed to 

 carry in his backpack all the newspapers 

 he needed for pressing his hundreds of 

 botanical specimens. 



The visions he experienced under the 

 influence of the Yanomamo tribe's hallu- 

 cinogenic snuff called epena illustrate 

 how a shaman can control the minds and, 

 therefore, the forest spirits of his village or 

 tribe. In this case, the shaman's control 



was total, because he blew the snuff 

 through a long tube into the communer's 

 nostrils — one puff at a time — until the de- 

 sired effect was achieved. 



During stays among several tribes, 

 Plotkin observed that their shamans' learn- 

 ing was not being transmitted to a new 

 generation. Young men were more inter- 

 ested in maintaining their gardens or their 

 families than in the work of healing. Thus, 

 Plotkin realized that shamans were in dan- 

 ger of disappearing, even without the cul- 

 tural disintegration that accompanies the 

 appearance of missionaries or miners who 

 actively oppose retaining the old ways of 

 tile forest. 



The denouement of Plotkin's adven- 

 tures occurred when he returned to the vil- 

 lage of Kwamala, in Suriname, after an 

 absence of several years. He brought with 

 him a book-length typescript of his notes 

 on how the tribe used its local plants and 

 presented it to the local headman. Without 

 consulting Plotkin, the headman and vil- 

 lagers decided to use it for teaching new 

 generations of shamans. Shamans' learn- 

 ing would be passed on to "apprentices," 

 using the American scientist's notes as 

 their textbook. 



Plotkin has achieved, in part at least, his 

 second goal — insuring that Amazonian 

 tribes will share in financial profits from 

 remedies discovered in their territories. 

 Early on, he had decided that he would not 

 submit his botanical specimens for labora- 

 tory analysis until one or more drug com- 

 panies had shown definite interest — and 

 until a mechanism for charmeling some of 

 the profits back to the Indians had been de- 

 veloped. His efforts prompted tire estab- 

 lishment of both the nonprofit Healing 

 Forest Conservancy, whose goal is to re- 

 turn a percentage of the profits on any 

 remedies identified in Amazonian flora to 

 tiie peoples of the forest, and a firm called 

 Shaman Pharmaceuticals, which is cur- 



