Word: plotkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...search of such medical bounty, Mark Plotkin, director of the World Wildlife Fund's plant program, has spent months at a time living with the Tirio tribe on the Suriname-Brazil border, studying the little-known plants the shamans use to treat patients. "Each time one of the medicine men dies," he says, "it's as if a library has burned down...
...children. Even those who recover uneventfully can be painfully reminded of the disease in adulthood by shingles. The chickenpox virus is a member of the herpes family of viruses that can lie dormant along nerves for decades and be suddenly reactivated, possibly by stress or injury. Says Virologist Stanley Plotkin of the University of Penn sylvania: "Shingles causes severe, insane pain in one in 10,000 Americans a year...
Some researchers are concerned that the vaccine's altered vi rus might actually promote the development of shingles. Another great worry is cancer. Viruses are a suspected cause, and another member of the herpes family, the simplex virus, is under suspicion, says Plotkin, "though proof is far from complete." Dr. Kenneth Mclntosh, a pediatrician at the Infectious Disease Laboratory of Boston's Children's Hospital, warns that before the Merck vaccine can be put to widespread use, "more years" of research are necessary to resolve such questions. Researchers also need to know how long the immunity...
...have yet to determine. In the forests of Gahan and Cameroon, restriction recently discovered 17 previously un described species of tree. Over three fourths of all plant species exist in tropical forests, which have been described as "genetic reservoirs." As article in the current issueof New Scientist by Mark Plotkin and Richard Schyles, director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, notes that "conservative estimates put the member of plant and animal species in rain forests at about two million of which fewer than half have ever been described by scientists...
...scrutinizing Latin American forests, Plotkin and schultes have found over 1000 plants that can be used as foods, drugs or industrial materials. Medical uses range from contraceptives to cures for skin infection, and one edible plant is apparently "as good a source of protein as meat and better than say beans," the researchers...