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.""
Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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 t
What about the ancient practice... (Score:4, Interesting)
As the saying goes; a month in the lab can save you a whole day in the library. Is this really new in a good way? Given the fact that many plants have alternate names, some have the same name, etc. it seems that familiarity with one's subject material is not a particularly useful thing to shortcut-out. Consider, for example, the parable of the 'mustard seed' in the gospels. A grown mustard plant is described as a great tree. Huh?! Even when people are familiar with the text, translations of old plant names are often difficult.
I'd just as soon read a machine translation of the bible or tartouffe than rely upon this technique. In fact, I'd sooner read a machine translation of the bible. Even if it mistranslated things, at least it'd be less likely to gloss the text. But that's not so much a problem with ethnobotany.
"Text mining" is a solution which found the wrong problem.
What?! (Score:1)
Perhaps I am missing something but this makes it sound like there are people who are against this project. Other than some people objecting to this being a waste of time (I don't think it is), what else is there to be "negative" about? I mean the authors of these works have been dead for quite some time.
Re:What?! (Score:2, Insightful)
The "negative" is that "westerners" (a laughable term when talking about, say, indigenous Brazilians vs US Drug companies, as this article begins with) ask native Shamen for information about useful plants, then take that powerful knowledge and make lucrative drugs without allowing compensation to flow back to the indigenous people.
OK, that is a negative, I conce
Re:What?! (Score:1)
This still doesn't seem to have anything to do with ethics, though. Unless "ethics" is merely used as a term for balming the guilty consciences of first-world drug executives.
Re:What?! (Score:2)
Ethnology and biopiracy (Score:1)
Perhaps I am missing something but this makes it sound like there are people who are against this project. Other than some people objecting to this being a waste of time (I don't think it is), what else is there to be "negative" about? I mean the authors of these works have been dead for quite some time.
What problem do people have with it? One word, "biopiracy'.
FalconRe:What?! (Score:1)
Then comes the "Ooops." (Score:4, Insightful)
Ooops. We wiped out that plant's habitat to build a highway.
Ooops...Football stadium.
Ooops...McMansions.
Nothing left to see here. Move along and look for another miracle plant.
only 7 comments! (Score:2)
slash dot (Score:2, Funny)
Re:slash dot (Score:2)