Nat Bletter
Graduate Student, New York Botanical Garden
Ph.D., City University of New York Graduate Center, Lehman College
New York
"Quantitative Cross-Cultural Medical Ethnobotany of Peru and Mali"
Expertise: Ethnobotany
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Profile |
Ethnobotany has proven to be a valuable method to find new herbal medicines and plant-derived drugs, but given limited resources, thousands of plants to consider, and many cultures to investigate, where can we focus our attention? With only about 0.5% of the known 250,000 species of angiosperms examined for medicinally active compounds, 25% of all pharmacy-prescribed western drugs being derived from plants, and a more than $25 billion yearly worldwide market in plant-based medicines, this is obviously a fruitful area to explore. Techniques are needed to narrow in on the plants with the highest medical potential, however. Building on previous work in quantitative ethnobotany, a new way to determine plants with high medical potential that are worthy of further investigation is being explored. High-potential candidates are picked by finding related plants from unrelated cultures that are used to treat the same or related diseases. The relations between cultures, plants, and diseases are derived from phylogenetic trees where feasible. This is a method of corroborating that the plants have biologically active compounds in them, and it avoids problems in previous similar techniques where plants are grouped by family. This technique is then used to analyze and compare herbal remedies for diabetes, eczema, asthma, malaria, and uterine fibroids collected from herbalists from different traditions (Ayurvedic, Chinese, European, Dominican, and Cuban) around New York City, as well as Itza and Q'eqchÌ Mayan groups in Guatemala, the Asháninka of Peru, and the Malinké of Mali.
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Selected Publications |
Bletter, N., Janovec, J, Brosi B, and Daly, D. C. 2004. “A digital base map for studying the Neotropical flora”, Taxon, 53(2): 469-477.
Bletter, N. 2006. "Talking Books: A New Method of Returning Ethnobiological Research Documentation to the Non-literate." Economic Botany, 60(1):85-90.
Bletter, N. and D. Daly. 2006. "Cacao and its relatives in South America: An overview of taxonomy, ecology, biogeography, chemistry, and ethnobotany" in Cameron L. McNeil ed. Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao , University Press of Florida.
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