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The drugs of tomorrow may be lurking in the fragile pages of ancient herbal texts. At least that's the hope of an adventurous research project to tap into traditional knowledge lost in the dusty vaults of libraries around the world.
Eric Buenz, lead investigator for the Bioprospecting Historic Texts Project at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., believes that ancient herbal texts are an untapped source of ethnobotanical knowledge. To plumb the depths of this treasure trove, Buenz and his colleagues use an automated process that scans books at 1,000 pages per hour, and then uses character recognition and literature databases to identify plants with therapeutic potential.
Given the possibility that some ancient medical solutions were wrong, Buenz ranks texts according to their potential usefulness. Points are assigned if texts describe treatments used in modern practice in some shape or form; points ...
