The Healing Forest: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rainforest

Presented by: Wade Davis, PhD, FLS Between 25 and 40 percent of all modern drugs are derived from plants, and amajority of these were first used as medicines or poisons in a folk context. Thegift of the shaman and the curandero, the herbalist and the witch include suchbasic pharmaceuticals as cocaine and morphine, digitalis and curarine, aspirinand quinine. With both the tropical rainforests and the indigenous peoples beingdestroyed at a horrendous rate, ethnobotanists are now engaged in a final race todiscover the medical secrets of the plants before they are lost forever. For three years Wade Davis traveled in the Andes and Northwest Amazon, livingamong a dozen or more tribes as he searched for new sources of medicine for themodern world. Journeys by jeep, mule, dugout, river raft and on foot led him to adozen or more indigenous groups including the Ika, Kamsa, Barasana, Cubeo,Tukano and Paez of Colombia, the Kuna and Choco of Panama, the Kofan, Shuarand Waorani of Ecuador, the Bora, Witoto and highland Quechua of Peru and theChimane and Aymara of Bolivia. Alone or with botanical colleagues, Davis madesome 6000 botanical collections which have since been distributed to herbariathroughout the world. In this lecture Davis both reviews the results of hisexpeditions and outlines the hopes and expectations of the ongoing program ofethnobotanical exploration that today seeks from the forests new treatments forcancer, AIDS and a host of actions that affect the well-being of all humansocieties.