Drug-taking gorillas may hold secrets of future medicines

[pesco]

Originally published at: Drug-taking gorillas may hold secrets of future medicines - Boing Boing

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[szielins]

You can kill germs with onion juice, but that doesn’t mean onions are a drug.

Looking at the paper at Antibacterial and antioxidant activities of plants consumed by western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in Gabon , the activity tests were done in vitro. That is, mush up some raw plant bits and drop them into a test tube holding some germy water, and some of the germs will die. Lots of things can do that, ranging from deadly poisons to distilled water. This is what we’d expect, because plants are in a constant chemical war with everything else on the planet.

Pharmaceuticals need to have a useful effect that outweighs their harmful effects, which is a much higher bar to clear. Indeed, for gorillas eating any of these four plants to merit the gloss “drug-taking gorillas”, the stuff also has to be present in a high enough concentration to accomplish something, AND be capable of having its effect when consumed orally. I wouldn’t even want to try to write the grant for that; we don’t have enough gorillas left to bother the survivors with it

[smulder]

@szielins

You can kill germs with onion juice, but that doesn’t mean onions are a drug

… it does if we sell them in a box with a label that says “this will cure your germ disease”