_____________________
Medicine Man
Immersed in aborigines' healing practices, Mark Plotkin helped build a
bridge to modern science
By Sy Montgomery, Globe Correspondent, 09/21/98
When Mark Plotkin first landed at the edge of the rain forest of
southwest Suriname, north of Brazil, his pilot gave him this advice:
''Stay away from the women. If you do not, the men will come after
you, and all their arrows have poison tips. Have a good trip, and I'll
see you in two months.''
The plane flew away, leaving the 27-year-old Tufts Ph.D. candidate
surrounded by Tirio Indians, clad in red breechcloths and harpy eagle
feathers and bristling with poisoned arrows.
The Tirio called the pale-skinned student from Boston ''pananakiri'' -
''the alien.'' But his mission was even stranger: He had come to
apprentice himself to a witch doctor.
It was 1982, and he was one of the first of a new generation of
scientists in a field that most people had never heard of:
ethnobotany, combining anthropology
with botany to study how people use plants as medicines.
Today, ethnobotany is no longer obscure, thanks in no small part to
Plotkin, now 43.
''More than anyone, he's popularized ethnobotany, and the importance
of oral natural history of indigenous people,'' said Michael Goulding,
a University of Florida expert on Amazon fishes.
In fact, some researchers privately grouse that science shouldn't be
popularized Indiana Jones-style, and object to Plotkin's showmanship.
''It takes courage to do that, especially as a scientist,'' said
Goulding. ''He's going to take some heat for that, like Carl Sagan''
(who was repeatedly voted down for membership in the National Academy
of Sciences amid criticism of his efforts to popularize science).
''But his work has been really important.''
Plotkin's 1993 book, ''Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice,'' has gone
through 15 printings. His first book for children, ''The Shaman's
Apprentice,'' co-authored and illustrated by Lynne Cherry, was
published in April and is being hailed by reviewers as the best book
on the rainforest for children.
On Friday, Plotkin returns to Boston, where his exotic career began,
for the opening at the Museum of Science of a large-format Omnimax
film featuring his quest for herbal medicines. Nominated for an
Academy Award, the 45-minute film ''Amazon'' has drawn record crowds
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and large-screen
theaters from Munich to Taipei.
''Mark has done more than anybody else to get this message across to
audiences that might not intrinsically care about rain forests and
indigenous cultures,'' said crop ecologist Gary Nabhan, director of
science at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. ''He can make that
connection - a living bridge between modern science and indigenous
science.''
Until a decade or so ago, ''indigenous science'' was dismissed as
mumbo-jumbo. But as Plotkin points out, ''the line between magic and
medicine can be very thin.'' Studies of plant chemistry show not only
that many herbal cures do work, but also why: Particularly in the
buggy tropics, plants have evolved a chemical warfare arsenal against
leaf-munching insects. Those chemicals can profoundly affect the human
body as well, with effects ranging from the kick of caffeine to the
lethal toxicity of strychnine, from the addictive compounds in heroin
to the painkiller in codeine.
Amazonian herbalists have known this for centuries. In the foreword to
Plotkin's first book, Richard Evans Schultes, the Harvard professor
emeritus who is credited with founding ethnobotany as a science, wrote
that one of Plotkin's ''outstanding qualities'' was ''his conviction
that among the Indians, he is the student and they are the teachers.''
Plotkin, in turn, says he learned this conviction from Schultes - the
man Plotkin calls ''The Great White Witch-Doctor,'' and the first
shaman to whom he apprenticed himself.
As a young college dropout working as a curatorial assistant at
Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Plotkin signed up to take a
night course with Schultes. A slide from the first lecture changed
Plotkin's life.
''These are Yukuna Indians doing the sacred Kaiyahree dance under the
influence of a hallucinogenic potion,'' the tall, white-haired
Schultes narrated, projecting an image of three men wearing bark masks
and grass skirts. ''The one on the left has a Harvard degree. Next
slide, please.''
>From the moment he saw his mentor in the photo, says Plotkin, he knew
what he wanted to do. But becoming an ethnobotanist meant much more
than learning plant chemistry in the classrooms of Harvard, Yale, and
Tufts. At times, Plotkin discovered, his work demanded that he pick
squiggling worm larvae out of bubbling pots and eat boiled rats with
the whiskers still on. He's participated in tribal festivals and
ceremonies, festooned himself with macaw feathers and anteater claws,
and let himself be painted with dark blue ink for festivals (ink that,
he discovered on his way back to the States, does not readily wash
off.)
Sometimes he has been welcomed more warmly than he expected. When he
first introduced himself to a shaman of a tribe of Yanomamo Indians on
the Brazil-Venezuela border, the witch doctor smiled, took down a long
bamboo tube from the rafters of his roundhouse, inserted the end into
Plotkin's right nostril and exhaled forcefully. The researcher spent
the rest of the day wildly hallucinating with his new-found Yanomamo
friends.
''You come to build up a relationship based on trust, friendship and
even love,'' said Plotkin, ''before they'll open up to you and teach
you the secrets of the forest.''
Over the last 50 years, those secrets have yielded a number of drugs
now used in Western medicine. The most effective chemotherapy drugs
for childhood leukemia, vincristine and vinblastine, are based on the
rosy periwinkle, which Malagasy healers used to treat diabetes.
Epibetadine, an experimental new painkiller, is made from the toxic
secretions of a rainforest frog. A compound extracted from the
Amazon's dragon's blood tree became the basis of the experimental
herpes drug Virend, which is featured in the film.
But as some 90 other ethnobotanical research projects vie to extract
new medicines from the tropics, Plotkin is focused on preserving
vanishing tribal knowledge and lands. By some estimates, a patch of
rain forest nearly the size of the Boston Common is destroyed every 90
seconds; 10 percent of the world's plant species may be extinct by the
millennium. No fewer than 90 tribes in Brazil alone have also gone
extinct in this century.
''Every time one of these medicine men dies, it is as if a library has
burned down,'' Plotkin said. ''In fact, it's worse than that, because
this is knowledge that is recorded nowhere else. When these men die,
this knowledge is lost forever.''
In an interview, he recalled that he saw this firsthand among the
Tirio, who taught him herbal cures for eye ailments, colds and sore
throats, and deep fungal infections of the skin. By the time he left,
they no longer called him ''pananakiri'' but ''jaco'' - brother.
But when he returned to the village in 1994 after an absence of
several years, Plotkin was dismayed to find that missionaries had
convinced the Tirio that their medicine was inferior.
Plotkin found his Tirio friend Amasina red-eyed with conjunctivitis.
Plotkin was traveling with a Mexican doctor, a fellow ethnobotanist.
The physician had run out of antibiotic cream, but he had recognized
an herb growing on the airstrip: in Mexico, it is called golondrina,
and local healers use it to cure conjunctivitis.
The doctor squeezed some of the sap into Amasina's eye. Plotkin asked
his friend if he knew the plant.
''Yes,'' said the Tirio. ''And did you once have a medicinal use for
it?'' Plotkin asked. ''Sure,'' he replied. ''We used to use it to
treat red-eye.''
Incidents like these ignited the Shaman's Apprentice program. Begun in
1987 when Plotkin was chief ethnobotanist for World Wildlife Fund, the
program provides young men and women in forest societies with the
funds they need to make it their jobs to learn from traditional
healers. Funded in part by proceeds from Plotkin's first book, the
program currently supports apprentices in Costa Rica, Colombia, and
Suriname. Guaymi Indians walked dozens of miles from Panama through
the jungle to see for themselves how the program was working in Costa
Rica - and decided to begin a similar program of their own.
To augment those efforts, Plotkin in 1995 founded the Ethnobiology and
Conservation Team. Its officers and consultants, who draw little
salary and no benefits, work in the villages and outlying jungles with
their indigenous colleagues, training apprentice shamans and lobbying
to protect forest dwellers' traditional lands from timbermen, miners,
ranchers and farmers. The point, says Plotkin, is to ''marry the
ancient wisdom of the shamans to 21st century technology to reinvent
the conservation agenda.''
Shamans from different tribes also learn much from one another, like
Western scientists at scientific meetings. In July, the Ethnobiology
and Conservation Team facilitated a meeting of six shamans and 12
apprentices from the Ingano and Correguaje tribes in Colombia.
The value of such cross-cultural exchange forms the storyline for the
film ''Amazon.'' At the same time that Plotkin sets out for the
Amazon, the film portrays a tribal shaman from the Andean highlands of
Bolivia setting off downriver on a similar quest. (The Bolivian shaman
is played by a Bolivian musician; Plotkin explained the tribe couldn't
spare its shaman for the six months it took to shoot the film.)
''Traditionally, people are considered the conservation problem,''
said Plotkin. ''People kill animals. People destroy habitat. But the
beauty of ethnobotany is it shows that people are not only a threat to
the forest, but people, and particularly so-called primitive people,
are going to provide us with many of the answers.''
Sy Montgomery is an author and naturalist who lives in New Hampshire.
Mark Plotkin will read from his new book at the Boston Museum of
Science Friday, Sept. 25, at 3 p.m. at the opening of the film
''Amazon.'' The reading is free. ''Amazon'' will be shown at 2, 4, 6,
8, and 10 p.m. Friday, and thereafter at various times daily
through December. Call 617-723-2500. Tickets are $7.50, $5.50 for
children and seniors.
You can visit Ethnobiology and Conservation Team's Web site at
http://ethnobotany.org
This story ran on page C01 of the Boston Globe on 09/21/98. ©
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.