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Cancer Fighting Drug Found in Dirt
firesquirt writes "From an article in LiveScience, the bark of certain yew trees can yield a medicine that fights cancer. Now scientists find the dirt that yew trees grow in can supply the drug as well, suggesting a new way to commercially harvest the medicine."
But do most people know about these differences? Hell, I'll admit that even I have no idea what you're talking about. All I know is that mutations in cells's DNA can cause them to replicate uncontrollably, hence cancer. There are differences in lung/blod/colon/skin cancer? Sounds plausible! ... but I have no idea what they are. To me, and to most normal people, "cancer" encompasses all cancers.
... and yet, we all understand what is meant when we say something advances "science".
I guess it's like saying a certain finding advances "science". But wait, you say, there are a lot of sciences! Yes, there are, and the finding most likely only really advances one of the sciences
Your joke points to a sad reality however, that it's only through patenting cures (ie having a monopoly over a cure) can pharmaceutical companies (free enterprises) get the investment capital to develop medicines. Cures are IP, traded and guarded.
Moreso, the last thing any pharmaceutical monopoly can afford is for people to get better very easily. For this reason cures are highly guarded discoveries: there are many cures around we don't have access to, and perhaps never will, either because they threaten an existing sickness market or because the IP pushes the price up beyond our reach. Just because we hear about a cure doesn't mean we'll ever see that cure in the wild. Expand this grim fact 100 fold in places like Africa or India where the cost of IP literally comes between them and surviving an otherwise perfectly cureable disease (if only production and distribution were the only cost).
In many respects sickness itself is a managed resource and pharaceutical patents - as a monopoly of a cure - are an active ingredient in this logic.
It's quite interesting to note that one of the species of yew mentioned (i assume the most useful at yielding the drug) has been classified as NT (Near threatened).
This basically means the species is "considered threatened with extinction in the near future". With such a large area of yew trees producing such a small amount of drug, careful measures are going to have to be taken so as not to kill off our new hope for a cancer cure. It's also quite interesting to note that the yew only grows to about 15metres, and so much smaller than what i would know as a (european) yew tree.
Most people forget that all higher organisms depend heavily on micribiota for their survival. For example, most of the complex micronutrients (e.g. B-comlplex vitamins) in plants are generated in soil bacteria. For these drugs, look to the rhizobacteria as the source of the genes for these compounds. The commensal relationships these bacteria sustain with particular plant species could be important, but it's possible these things could be grown in vitro and yield a nice industrial solution.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom