Text-mining for Medicinal Plants 15
Damien1972 writes "Researchers are exploring ancient texts for medicinal plant information using text-mining. From Shamans and Robots: Bridging the Past and Future of Ethnobotany and Bioprospecting: "A new procedure that is being explored by researchers to track and classify useful medicinal plant species may negate some of the issues surrounding the acquisition of knowledge ... This method involves a practice called "text-mining," in which old botanical works are scoured for references to medicinal plants.""
ethnobotany, plants, and patents (Score:2, Informative)
This would be a good use for Wikipedia, each plant's information should be put into into this opensource encyclopedia.
I see this as part of the problem, getting the information out, reporting plants drug use out of books into a format more people can use. Perfect use for Wikipedia.
Getting the information out is part of the problem however there's more to it than simply listing it on Wikipedia or other databases, whether open 'sauce' or proprietary. As the article points out it takes people to study the culture of indigenous peoples and learn how they use different plants which brings up a problem indegenous people are having with outsiders, biopiracy. Scientists, usually working for pharmaceutical or other companies learn about some medical treatment using a plant or part of the plant then they go and slap a patent on it. An example of this is the ayahuasca vine or Banisteriopsis caapi of the Amazon Forest. American Indian tribes throughout the Amazon have been using it for centuries if not millenia and the Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), a group of Amazonian people had to fight a patent the US Patent and Trademark Office issued to International Plant Medicine Corporation based in California for the plant. Here's a short article on it, Amazon Indigenous Win Patent Dispute Over Ayahuasca. [forests.org] A search for "biopiracy" on Google News [google.com] returns 25 results from the Amazon to New Zealand. A Google search of the web returns more than 70,000 results. An article was posted here on /. in November about how an Iraqi law required farmers to pay a licensing fee just in case they used GE seed. Iraq law Requires Seed Licenses [slashdot.org]
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