South Pacific’s Healers May Hold Nature’s Ancient Cures : Health: Paul Alan Cox is tapping into island medicines to battle AIDS and other illnesses. But time is short.

Paul Alan Cox, ethnobotanist, Fulbright scholar and Harvard Ph.D., thought he could spend three months with Samoan healing women and completely absorb their medical wisdom.

A decade later, he laughs at his presumption.

“It took me three months just to learn their medical lexicon,” Cox said.

“I was absolutely fluent in Samoan, but it was like hitting a brick wall. It was like talking to a Ph.D. in pharmacology.”

Now 40, Cox has built a career on seeking the knowledge of South Pacific healers who use plants to make draughts and poultices that could be as useful to modern medicine as to their Polynesian patients.

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His quest has urgency. The rain forests, with their botanical treasures, are shrinking. Many elderly healers have no apprentices. And Cox is one of a few scientists working in the field of ethnobotany, a discipline that depends as much on understanding the practitioners of folk medicine as the plants they use.

“Every time one of the healers dies, it’s like having a library burned,” said Cox, a professor at Brigham Young University.

“It’s a race against time, because there are so few of us doing this work,” he said.

“Who died today? Maybe there’s someone we never met who could have helped someone with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.”

It is estimated that of 265,000 flowering species of plants on earth, less than half of 1% have been studied exhaustively.

Even so, their potential is manifest in the number of familiar drugs derived from plants--aspirin, codeine, ipecac and quinine among them.

Cox estimates he has a 1-in-30 chance of finding a plant that could produce a pharmaceutical compound. But his work may already have borne fruit.

In 1984, Cox was told by Samoan healers about a rain forest tree whose pulverized wood was steeped into a brew and used to treat yellow fever. He sent it to the National Cancer Institute, which isolated an antiviral compound called prostratin. The NCI now considers prostratin a candidate for clinical trials as a possible therapy for AIDS.

Dr. Gordon Cragg, chief of the natural products branch at NCI, said Cox’s discovery is the only lead on an anti-AIDS agent to come from an ethnobotanist, although others are studying plants for the same purpose.

Cragg emphasized that prostratin and the other compounds are being tested in the laboratory only, and any treatment for humans is a distant goal. And because the NCI focuses on AIDS and cancer, not such ordinary ailments as fever or diarrhea that an indigenous healer might treat, the applications at NCI are limited.

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Still, Cragg said, the isolation of prostratin is a “very convincing demonstration of the power of ethnobotany.”

For Cox, even a slim chance of finding a way to help AIDS patients is exhilarating.

“I’m holding a lottery ticket, prostratin, and it might work and it might not,” he said. “But what a grand game to be in!”

Cox also learned of an anti-inflammatory compound deriving from the bark of another tree. Scientists at two Eastern pharmaceutical companies are developing the compound as a topical anti-inflammatory.

A Utah native whose father was a park ranger and mother a fisheries biologist, Cox comes by his passion naturally.

As a Mormon missionary in Samoa, he learned the language and fell in love with the people and islands.

He returned to Utah for a bachelor’s degree at BYU, won a Fulbright to the University of North Wales, then went to Harvard for a doctorate in rain forest biology.

It was in Cambridge that he met ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who in the early 1980s helped swing the pendulum of research back from the synthetic drug development that had supplanted the search for natural sources.

Two years of research at Berkeley followed.

In 1984, he packed up his four young children and wife Barbara, a mathematician, and went to live and work for a year on Savaii, in Western Samoa.

Life was primitive but sweet--every morning he and his wife dragged out a duffel bag full of textbooks and “hut-schooled” their kids. Cox made himself the healers’ apprentice.

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He has worked elsewhere--Tonga, Fiji, Australia, Africa and Costa Rica, among other places--and speaks Samoan, Tongan, Spanish and Bishlama, the language of the Solomon Islands.

But Samoa remains a special place.

All healers are women who pass on their knowledge to their daughters. There are four specialties: the fofo, or massage healer; fofogau, bone-setter; fa’atosaga, midwife; and the taulesea, herbalists who make medicine from plants.

And there are male chiefs, the stewards of the land, who must be asked in the resplendent rhetoric they favor before the healers can be consulted.

“I might be talking to a Samoan chief wearing a wraparound (garment) and with an enormous tattoo on his chest, and he sounds like an Oxford don speaking to me,” Cox said.

There are quacks, of course. Cox tells of a Samoan man who claimed he was a healer--already a sure tip-off--and “diagnosed” his patients by stirring a box full of auto parts with a stick.

The true healer typically can identify 200 species of plants in her environment and each one’s application and has a very specific vocabulary of biological forms, Cox said.

Thus, respect is paramount.

“I tell my students, ‘If you can sit in a hut and respect the person, they can feel that, no matter what. Live your life with indigenous people as if at any moment they could read your heart--because they probably can.”’

So well assimilated is Cox that he was made a chief himself, in the village of Falealupo.

Through his Utah-based Seacology Foundation, he helped establish a 65,000-acre rain forest preserve where the plant that produces prostratin was found.

In exchange, the foundation built schools and clinics.

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Using a solar-powered laptop in the field, Cox takes care to type his notes in the native language, then lets his teachers proof his work.

He also believes they are entitled to the same intellectual rights as any researcher, and that any significant royalties from a drug like prostratin should be returned.

“I don’t consider them to be informants but colleagues,” Cox said.

“Within this decade, we’ll have drugs prescribed in this country that came straight from a ‘witch doctor’s’ pouch.”