PharmAntica©
Toward the end of the 20th century, research for new avenues for pharmaco-medical investigation explored the traditional knowledge of Indigenous communities that continued to rely on natural resources for health purposes. This research, known at the time as bioprospection, brought to light significant concerns regarding the ownership of traditional knowledge, ultimately leading to the acknowledgment of the rights of these communities. In 2005 an Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Access and Benefit-sharing was established to develop a protocol to address these concerns. In 2010, negotiations concluded in a meeting in Nagoya, Japan, resulting in the adoption of the so-called Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity aimed at guaranteeing “fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources, including by appropriate access to genetic resources and by appropriate transfer of relevant technologies, taking into account all rights over those resources and to technologies, and by appropriate funding”.
During this period, historical texts began to be investigated. The evolution of imaging and computer technologies played a crucial role in this research, particularly through the large-scale scanning and digitization of ancient documents, mainly printed books, via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This led to the creation of vast libraries that compiled information from reports on botanical explorations in territories absorbed by imperial expansion. Many of these documents provide insights into the traditional uses of plants and natural resources for food and medicine. Data mining, facilitated by bioinformatics, was applied to these vast datasets to identify plants suitable for further laboratory analysis aimed at discovering active molecules that could be further modulated or synthesized through molecular design. In its most advanced form, research now employs artificial intelligence to navigate vast digital data landscapes, to sift through enormous data reservoirs available online, potentially uncovering patterns and connections that may elude human cognition.
The results did not align with expectations. The therapeutic properties of plants could not be reduced to a single mechanism and appeared elusive. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries efforts to discern what could be recognized as the core mechanism of action of the plants utilized in therapeutics had a long history. From the early 19th century onward, French pharmaco-chemists and their German counterparts succeeded in materializing this core mechanism in the form of solid chemical components—actually crystalized extracts. During the 19th century medicinal plants and other substances underwent thorough analysis and transformation into chemical compounds derived from nature. In 1874, the tandem of Friedrich August Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury authored Pharmacographia—A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origins met with in Great Britain and British India, which summed up contemporary knowledge of natural substances in those geographical areas. In a certain sense, the work was premonitory. Thirty-five years later, in 1909, German biochemist Paul Ehrlich revolutionized the process of drug-making by shifting the focus from extracting active components of existing medicines to identifying the actions of the chemical substances he synthesized, representing a paradigm shift in pharmacotherapeutics.
In the 20th century, the presence of plants in therapeutic practices diminished significantly. The diverse and often apparently contradictory medicinal uses of plants, which might be seen as a characteristic of traditional medicine, offered a compelling argument for pharmaco-chemistry, which focused on a nearly mathematical correlation between pathogens and active ingredients.
By the 1920s, physicians compiled and recorded the traditional medicinal uses of plants, perhaps driven by a sense of urgency reminiscent of Flückiger and Hanbury’s Pharmacographia. French physician Henri Leclerc paved the way for the field of phytotherapy. He not only introduced the term but also published a short, yet fundamental Précis de phytothérapie (Manual of Phytotherapy) in 1922, along with numerous concise monographic studies on medicinal plants, primarily featured in the Revue de phytothérapie (Journal of Phytotherapy), which he founded. German physician Ernst Meyer soon followed, publishing a 200-page volume in 1935 entitled Pflanzliche Therapie—Eine Einleitung mit Beispielen zur Rezeptur (Plant Therapeutics. An Introduction with Examples of Recipes). Slightly later (1938), Gerhard Madaus made a significant contribution with his extensive three-volume Lehrbuch der biologischen Heilmittel (Textbook of Biological Remedies), which totals nearly 3,000 pages and acted as an encyclopedic comprehensive resource.
Although the traditional uses of plants seemed on the verge of a revival, the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 transformed pharmacotherapy, culminating in the Golden Age of the pharmaceutical industry post-World War II. However, the 1970s announced a resurgence of medicinal plants, marked by influential figures such as Richard Evan Schultes in the United States, celebrated as the Father of Modern Ethnobotany, Jean-Marie Pelt in France, who authored no less than fifty books on plants and nature, and Christian Rätsch in Germany, known for his research into psychoactivity. Additionally, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, known for his discovery of LSD, and American businessman Andrew Watson, who explored psychoactive fungi, significantly contributed to this resurgence.
Since then, plants and their traditional uses have been essential components of everyday life, be it in medicine or in nutrition. Whereas research has focused on living traditional cultures or accounts of botanical explorations from the 17th-century onward, classical studies have not followed. Nevertheless, there has been increased interest in ancient botany and the medicinal plants of Greece, Rome or, more generally, Antiquity, as well as in ancient therapeutics, with translations, studies, and other works, some of which reached a wider audience benefitting from current fascination with history, especially Pompeii and its gardens. Nonetheless, these works do not usually consider the full range of documentation or analyze it as scientific texts that require application of specific, specialized scientific disciplines.
The fact is that sources are mainly textual, consisting of Greek and Latin treatises, as well as translations into Syriac, Arabic, or Coptic of works that have been lost in their original language. The archaeological evidence is sparse, and the available iconographic material is limited. Given its fundamentally textual character, research requires highly specialized linguistic skills and extensive experience to be complemented by training in the field (that is, in the lab) in the various disciplines that contribute to the make-up of pharmacotherapeutics, resulting in a cross-disciplinary practice of science and scholarship that is not widely adopted.
PharmAntica intends to fill these gaps. It draws upon a library collection that has been specifically assembled for this purpose, along with intensive cross-disciplinary research over the years. For each selected plant—be it a significant or an overlooked species—, it will produce a monographic issue that will offer all relevant texts—or the most pertinent—, including texts not published or currently unknown, identified through a comprehensive search for, and examination of, manuscripts in libraries around the world. Each ancient text reproduced in its original language will be accompanied by an English translation, whether it is a published or an original one, and will be thoroughly analyzed as a scientific work to extract its specific content. The resulting data will be presented according to the protocols of pharmacognosy and discussed as appropriate, thus facilitating access to information from ancient scientific literature for a wide range of research programs.