Traditional Knowledge, A Complement of Modern Science

This week, we talked about how traditional knowledge can be of use when conducting researches on a certain area. Knowledge tested and passed on generations and generations among indigenous people can compliment modern research technologies and provide a great amount of information otherwise unavailable for researchers unfamiliar with local environment.

In medical and pharmaceutical filed, it is also very common that researchers attempted worldwide to learn possible remedies from indigenous communities and make it possible for use after years of laboratory analysis.

According to CDC, “Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite. People with malaria often experience fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Left untreated, they may develop severe complications and die.” Though completely eliminated in the US, millions of people worldwide, especially regions with poor regional disease control and public health care, are still infected with malaria and a great amount of them are dying of it. In particular, most of them are children under age of 15 in African countries. Finding a effective therapy for the disease would mean saving millions’ lives from suffering.

In 2015, Dr. Youyou Tu was honored Nobel Prize for “her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria.” In her biography, she described how knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine was combined with western medicine to come up with a safe and effective antimalarial drug. They first start with reading through traditional medicine literature and folk recipes and interviewing with medical practitioner, she and her team summarized 640 prescriptions in a brochure entitled “Antimalarial Collections of Recipes and Prescriptions”. Then analyzing herbs and their pharmaceutical properties, they were able to decide that the herb called Qinghao (Chinese name for sweet wormweed) contains chemicals that inhibits malaria parasites. However, the common process of extracting chemicals from herbs cannot yield a stable and consistent drug materials.

However, In Ge Hong’s A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, she noticed one sentence “A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all” (青蒿一握, 以水二升渍, 绞取汁, 尽服之) when Qinghao was mentioned for alleviating malaria fevers. She then discovered that the idea of heating the herb during extraction may destroy the active component. She redesigned experiments in which the stems and leaves of Qinghao were extracted separately at a reduced temperature using water, ethanol and ethyl ether and was successful in extract the critical components of the antimalarial remedy.

In her breakthrough, the role of traditional knowledge can not be overlooked. As mentioned in the video we saw on Monday’s lecture, scientists and researches can learn a great deal from indigenous people and their knowledge which otherwise would not be available for them anyway.

In 21st centuries, we are seeing more and more cooperation among scientists and local communities in critical scientific breakthroughs and we are expecting a higher level of learning and exchanging among them in the future.