8 ms·
Professor who harnessed power of cactuses is a top inventor
- v8dev123 5y agoMy eyes getting so bad. I read the title as top investor instead top inventor.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago> Sometimes, if the water was dirty, she’d boil it with part of a cactus plant. Alcantar questioned how adding something gooey would help. Isn't this just clarifying? Like adding egg whites to clarify red wine or aspic. The same process (usually egg whites, but also some other gooey substances) is used to extract impurities from a lot of things.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoThe technical term is flocculation, but yes it's ultimately the same process. Cacti just happen to be a very cheap, commercially available source of large amounts of mucilage.
- smusamashah 5y agoIt means there has to be so many other undiscovered use of things that only the old and experienced know about. How about herbal medicine? Other household remedies? How about these things from a very different living environment and culture? I believe we shouldn't just dismiss the old remedies and other tricks.
- guram11 5y agolike snake oil ?
- Ovah 5y ago"A full 40 percent of the drugs behind the pharmacist’s counter in the Western world are derived from plants that people have used for centuries, including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs in the United States today. For example, quinine extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree (Cinchona calisaya) relieves malaria, and licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra) has been an ingredient in cough drops for more than 3,500 years." https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/index.shtml https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/inde...
- Consultant32452 5y agoMedical errors are the third leading cause of death. We like to imagine we’ve come a long way from treating ghosts in your blood with cocaine, but we haven’t. https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139 https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139
- gowld 5y agoThat's a very misleading summary. "Leading causes of death could be prevented by more perfect medical response" is a better summary.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- teh_infallible 5y ago“Leading causes of death” being medical incompetence, which is the third largest cause of death in the US
- rmah 5y agoA full 100% of the drugs sold today are manufactured using only ingredients found in nature! <sarcasm>
- Ovah 5y ago(I'm aware of the sarcasm tag). Technically that 100% should be 99.999%. Not all drugs are found in nature. Technetium, a man-made compound, is used in some radiology. https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT001978 https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT001978
- LeifCarrotson 5y agoNo, technetium is still a natural product, it just takes a little processing. An organic miner dug up some raw uranium ore, then someone refined it, irradiated it, and isolated the resulting molybdenum-99, and finally a radiologist extracts the all-natural technetium from the decay process of that molybdenum.
- burkaman 5y ago"we shouldn't dismiss" means we should try them and see if they work, not just automatically assume they work or automatically dismiss them as snake oil.
- s_dev 5y ago>I believe we shouldn't just dismiss the old remedies and other tricks. We test many of those remedies and tricks with a formal method. The ones that work further science and our collective understanding. The ones that don't are relegated as old wives tales. Even the article narrows in on this correctly. >Alcantar told her postdoc about this, and because they didn’t have a lab, directed him to try “a quick and dirty experiment.” >“Two days later he came back and said ‘Yeah, it worked,’” she said.
- tartoran 5y agoYes I agree, the ones that work are packaged, labeled and sold at a high profit as Pharmaceuticals.
- dylan604 5y agoTypically, the ones that work are quickly synthesized and a method that can be patented is developed. Then the plant is scheduled and kept illegal so that you have to pay the pharma for something that grows naturally.
- SomaticPirate 5y agoI'm always surprised by the vitriol directed at Biotech on HN. Isolating and enhancing the effect of a natural substance along with ensuring dosage typically requires quite a large amount of engineering effort. Why shouldn't that be patented? I think we can all agree that swallowing a tablet of aspirin is better than extracting your own from a willow tree.
- dylan604 5y agoThere's lots of things to not like about big pharma. How much money has big pharama spent on lobbying congress to keep certain plants scheduled so they can maintain their stockholders? The stories on big pharma and their role in the opioid crisis, stories on big pharma pricing structures that are not the same depending on who/where you are even though there's no difference in the pill. The agressive nature of pill pushing (even non-opiods) on doctors. The aggressive nature of advertising to desperate patients to pressure their doctors to prescribe medication that won't actually help but may worsen situations.
- pvaldes 5y agoSaponins are a well known type of substances. It was created as predators deterrent but we can use if as predator's detergent. There is even a tree that bears soap berries, so you don't need to kill any poor cactus or use animal fat for that. First course of plant physiology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/saponins https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology...
- RandallBrown 5y agoQ: Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works? A: Medecine. I think many old remedies have been tested and then get refined to work better. Willow bark was used for thousands of years as pain relief but now those chemicals found in the bark have been refined into aspirin.
- monkeybutton 5y agoThe example from folk medicine I like is Ergot. It comes from a fungus, was used by midwives for hundreds of years, and scientists investigating its derivatives in the late 30s / early 40s is what lead to LSD's discovery.
- M_bara 5y agoI have an uncle in his 70s. The other day he gave me some shrubbery to chew on coz of a toothache. I was like yeah-yeah let me humour him. Shock on me! The thing worked! Numbs the pain. In fact, any part of the tongue had a numbed feeling similar to the feeling you get when the dentist injects you.. I believe there’s probably a lot one can learn from the connected with nature older folks
- dr_orpheus 5y agoAnd we likely have learned from this! The plant likely had something like Menthol (from various mint) or Eugenol (clove, nutmeg, basil, etc) [0]. Both of these are examples of items where we found and isolated the compounds responsible for the desirable effects. Both of these are used as mild local anesthetics. Or he gave you some coca leaves to chew on since cocaine was one of the first really strong local anesthetics. A lot modern anesthetics are synthesized but based on the structure of cocaine, but without that pesky drug addiction and nasty side effects. This includes lidocaine, which what they do typically use at the dentist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_anesthetic#Naturally_derived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_anesthetic#Naturally_der...
- spoonjim 5y agoTu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for rediscovering artemisinin, a anti-malaria treatment, from a 1,600-year-old text and scientifically formalizing it. The medical handbook that first describes the formula (including the fact that you need to use low-temperature water) was written in the year 340. That's not a typo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_Hong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_Hong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoAlways listen to your grandma. Most people understand their parents' generation fairly well, but there is a lot of knowledge in generations further removed from our own that generally gets dismissed. That's not to say we should easily believe things from the past without evidence, but there's merit looking into and formally testing old ideas.
- rand0mx1 5y agoBoomers recommend cow urine in my country for any disease. Very knowledgeable.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoHow very early 18th century.
- tartoran 5y agoListening to just anybody and acting on it is probably not going to end up well. But a lot of things relegated to the past are yet to be re-"discovered" by pharma and made large profits out of them because using them as natural remedies is not very profitable.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoRunning large scale medical experiments on humans is costly. Vote for your tax dollars to do the research. But that doesn’t mean grandma has sufficient credibility about medicinal claims to warrant “always listen to your grandma”.
- vkou 5y agoMy grandma tells me that a draft in my apartment will make me catch a cold. If only there was a method for differentiating old nonsense from advice that actually works... A scientific one, even?
- foobarian 5y ago
- helge9210 5y agoCacti is a plural of cactus.
- TchoBeer 5y agoSure, in Latin. Cactus is (also) an English word and thus its plural is cactuses.
- dokem 5y agoEnglish intuition tells me I would use 'Cacti' when talking about cactus in general terms. 'Cactuses' would be appropriate when referring to a specific instance of multiple cactuses.
- newman8r 5y agoyou could probably also get away with a phrase like "look at all this cactus" or "this hill is full of cactus" I'm not sure if it's correct, but it sounds correct.
- monkmartinez 5y agoThat is how most of my friends use the word "cactus" in Arizona.
- renewiltord 5y agoThat is correct, at least descriptively. For instance, I will routinely hear this like "There's a lot of sequoia up North" or "That forest is now full of eucalyptus".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- twhb 5y agoIn English the plural is cacti, with cactuses and cactus also accepted. In general, trying to treat English as a rule-based language, not an amalgamation of special cases, will result in mistakes. Like “gooses”, “passerbies”, “milleniums”, “datas”, “childs”, “criterions”, “foots”, “mans”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cactus https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cactus