When I was doing my undergraduate and masters degrees at University of Natal (Durban), medicinal plants were definitely the hot thing to be researching. My honours project was looking at Warburgia salutaris, a tree whose bark is harvested for all sorts of medicinal purposes from stomach ulcers to malaria. We thought that it would be a good idea to look at what methods were best to treated to damaged trees to help the bark to regenerate as quickly as possible. To achieve this, strips of barks were removed and the damaged areas were either left untreated, covered with lanolin, or either CEPA (releases ethylene) or IAA (auxin) dissolved in lanolin. The bottom line was that lanolin on its own seemed to be the best.
The two active components are warburganal and polygodial and these aldehydes reacted with vanillin to make coloured compounds. I thought that it would be a good idea to stain the bark tissue slides (prepared by slicing the regenerated bark using a vibratome) with vanillin and I got quite a nice effect.
When I first heard of the South African-originating combretastin as an anti-vascular targeting agent I was really impressed. A friend also showed it working for me in a mouse window-chamber model.
But here’s a story which was truly amazing to my ears. I was at a DNA damage workshop in Orléans, France, and was attending a poster session on radiation-protectors. An Indian fellow was showing his data on the radio-protective effects of some high-altitude growing herbs in mice. When he irradiated these mice with an otherwise lethal dose, his animals were alive and kicking.
Getting slightly off topic here, sorry. Yet…tea for me, please!
That is an amazing story!
As a slight sidetrack, but related by the fact that the mice were alive and kicking when they should have been dead: I was thinking that we should create a non-destructible, but completely non-pathogenic bacterial strain (or whatever) and place the spores “somewhere” so that when we eventually do a behaviour that annihilates “everything”, life won’t have to start again completely from scratch. Perhaps someone has already done this???