Natural Products as Drugs - Biotechnology and Your Health: Pharmaceutical Applications - page 29

are manufactured semi-synthetically, meaning that the producing
organism is grown in huge industrial vats under very controlled
conditions. The antibiotic is purified from the liquid in which the
bacteria grow, and is then chemically modified to make it more
useful as a drug. These changes may make the antibiotic less expensive
Who Owns Nature's Medicine Cabinet?
Many of the medicines used in the United States come from plants or microorganisms
found in the environment. This includes medicines ranging from aspirin to antibiotics and
even Taxol, one of the most widely used cancer drugs. Plants and animals were widely used
in traditional medicine, and nature's “medicine cabinet” was the source for many early
drugs as chemists learned how to isolate the specific compounds that made medicinal
plants useful in treating human illness. Not surprisingly, pharmaceutical and biotechnology
companies still search all over the world today for new and better drugs.
These searches are based both on folk medicines and on systematic tests of extracts
from previously unknown plants and microorganisms. The search for a new drug from these
extracts involves many thousands of laboratory tests that use robots to run the tests and
computers to analyze the results. Because the diversity of plant and animal species is great-
est in the tropical rain forests in relatively underdeveloped parts of the world, the ethics of
exploiting that diversity, and of wealthy companies using folk medicine traditions, has been
challenged. Several international agreements, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), have supported sustainable
commercialization of biological resources and patenting of discoveries to encourage sharing
the benefits with the country of origin and the indigenous people whose traditional knowl-
edge may have formed the basis for the product. The CBD, not signed by the United States,
encourages large companies to recognize the right of each country to control access
to the biological resources within its borders. The CBD also created expectations that
bioprospecting companies would share with each country the benefits of the discoveries, in
the form of compensation and transfer of useful technologies, but these expectations have
not always been met. Several large pharmaceutical companies have provided funds, equip-
ment, and training to a private nonprofit association in Costa Rica in exchange for access
to its forests. It is not yet clear whether populations of the underdeveloped or developing
countries with the sought-after native biological resources and indigenous medical traditions
will benefit from these activities.