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August 1 - August 14, 2024
Matricin is additionally found in chamomile and yarrow,
matricin breaks down into the beautiful blue chemical chamazulene,
The piperidine alkaloids in the needles provide the starting point for the synthesis of opioids like fentanyl.
That river transformed my father into a happier and calmer version of himself. But he couldn’t take the river with him when he left. In the end, he died more than a thousand miles away from its waters and from all of us.
Atoms of calcium and phosphorous, born in the heart of a star billions of years ago, could now continue their journey, diatom to mayfly to trout.
bodies that run on many of the same ancient chemical messengers and proteins as those in the animal enemies of plants, fungi, and microbes.
pyrethrins bind to important protein passageways (voltage-gated sodium channels) for sodium ions in nerve cells. When pyrethrins bind to these proteins, the nerve cells wildly overfire, causing involuntary muscle contractions, paralysis, and even death.
Tetrodotoxin in the newt’s skin killed him. Like pyrethrins, tetrodotoxin targets the voltage-gated sodium channels but does so in a different location on the protein.
The use of toxic tools seamlessly evolved into the oral and written healing traditions I will collectively call the materia medica. These substances are found in every culture. In fact, those first used by Indigenous healers have yielded nearly 50 percent of all modern drugs we use today.
The truth is that what we like to call modern medicine is just the culmination of millions of years of pharmacognosy in our own primate lineage.
it is a profen, a drug that reduces inflammation.
One Neanderthal individual, known as El Sidrón Adult 1, or more affectionately as “Sid,” was probably quite ill when he died. The scientists suspected this condition because Sid had a dental abscess and was infected with a microsporidian pathogen that causes a diarrheal disease. (Poor Sid!). Sid’s tartar contained traces of toxins from yarrow and chamomile plants, including chamazulene, as well as DNA sequences from poplar trees and the fungus Penicillium. Poplar trees are a traditional source of salicylic acid, a type of salicylate used to make aspirin. Penicillium species are molds that
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The use of bitter leaf was associated with an uptick in intestinal nematode infections in the chimp population. Reductions in the chimp’s worm burden — in other words, recovery from worm infection — were observed after bitter pith chewing, suggesting that the plant’s toxin works as a dewormer.
Humans and chimps aren’t the only primates to self-medicate. Gorillas and orangutans, our next-closest relatives outside of chimps, do it, too. Remarkably, just as in the case of Vernonia, the adjacent Indigenous human populations use these same plants as medicines. For example, in Borneo, ten orangutans were observed to chew the leaves of Dracaena plants into a soapy froth that the animals then applied to their fur to repel parasites or treat skin diseases. Indigenous people living in the same forests that the orangutans occupy also use a poultice of leaves from this plant to treat several
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Paracelsus, “The dose makes the poison,”
Warfarin is also effective as a rodenticide but moves up the food chain, killing predators like eagles, owls, and mountain lions, and its use is banned in British Columbia because of these nontarget effects.
Roughly between 400 and 1800 CE, Europe and its colonies relied nearly exclusively on oak galls as the source of ink for writing. Even more notable, gall ink without iron was likely used seven hundred years earlier by the calligraphers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Salicylic acid, aspirin, and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen and naproxen (and possibly the chamazulene from chamomile) suppress the production of hormones called prostaglandins. Prostaglandins play a key role in turning on the inflammatory response in our bodies, causing inflammation and pain.
dial down one branch of the immune system in favor of dialing up another. Why did plants and animals evolve to do this? We don’t know for certain, but the organisms have limited resources and have evolved to economize.
shinrin-yoku
A five-carbon molecule called isoprene forms the backbone of all terpenoids. Isoprene is exhaled in every breath, and a hundred billion kilograms, an atmosphere-influencing quantity, is released by land plants each year globally. Our bodies make isoprene as a by-product of cholesterol biosynthesis, and the amount emitted can even be used to determine a person’s cholesterol levels.
When plants release isoprene into the air, the molecule reacts with oxygen radicals to form aerosols that produce a distinctive blue color in the lower atmosphere. The Blue Ridge Mountains of the United States, the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and Australia, and the Cordillera Paine (paine is Tehuelche for “blue”) in Chile may be so named, thanks to the isoprenepumping forests blanketing their flanks.
“blue stain” pine wood
wiigwaasabakoon,
through a glass, darkly.
Robert Dudley, a Berkeley colleague, has proposed the “drunken monkey” hypothesis to explain the widespread human use of dietary ethanol. His eponymous book was inspired by the death of his own father, which was hastened by AUD. The gist of Dudley’s idea is that the ethanol produced by brewer’s yeast in fruits can reliably signal ripeness to animals. This sign helps them find the fruit while also increasing consumption rates and the dispersal of swallowed seeds.
positive effects on mental health. Its benefits may accrue simply because of the psychological
Withering’s account is an example of how traditional knowledge forms the basis for most of modern medicines derived from nature.
The term alkaloid is derived from al-qili, the Arabic word for “ashes from plants.”
When he was a boy, he watched as his intoxicated father threatened his mother with a pistol in the kitchen. He told me that the experience terrified him.
So powerfully repugnant is the smell of death that even rats held in captivity bury the bodies of dead rats because of it.
Spermidine is particularly interesting. Adding it to the diets of laboratory animal models extended their life spans by 15 to 30 percent. In human cells bathed in spermidine, aging also slowed. However, we are only just beginning to understand the potential mechanisms. One effect of spermidine is that it helps keep our genes switched off. As cells age, more and more genes get turned on willy-nilly. The firing of too many genes can be problematic. Spermidine seems to keep older cells operating as they did when they were younger by reversing this trend to some degree. Small clinical trials show
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Not only good for your skin, but good for your brain too!
If broken open by an unlucky bite, papaya seeds produce burning mustard oils just like those in wasabi.
DMT and other related tryptamines are found in at least twelve plant families and in animals and fungi. The tryptamines bufotenine and O-methyl bufotenine are made by the skin of some toads as well as by several plant species. Magic mushrooms contain the tryptamine psilocybin and its psychoactive derivative psilocin. I will refer to these diverse tryptamines as DMTs unless noted because each has a DMT molecule at its core.
DMTs bind to our brain’s serotonin receptors, or 5-HT receptors, so called because serotonin is an endogenous tryptamine alkaloid, 5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT. They have an affinity for a specific type of 5-HT receptor called 5-HT 2A, which I’ll later show may be related to alcohol cravings.
Psilocin is ultimately detoxified by the MAOs, but unlike most DMTs, it is just naturally more resistant to the MAOs. Psilocybe mushrooms, also called magic mushrooms, have another trick up their sleeves. They produce both the psilocybin and the beta-carbolines — the psychedelic substance and the MAOIs. So, when animals consume these mushrooms, the psilocybin cannot easily be deactivated by their body’s MAOs, thanks to the beta-carbolines that are also in the mix. This biochemical interaction is an example of biological evolution and human cultural evolution both creating the same innovation —
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Because the chains of bonded psilocin molecules are probably also toxic to the mushrooms, there is an evolutionary advantage to keeping psilocybin in its prodrug state, with the fuse unlit, so that the chemicals don’t harm the mushroom.
Crucially, we now know that for many if not most people with AUD, chronic alcohol use reduces the number of glutamate receptors in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which controls executive functioning (like deciding to go to the fridge to get a beer or to stay put in your chair).
The root of the word coffee is traced to the Arabic qahwah, which may have originally referred to a kind of wine but has the root qahiya, which means “to have no appetite.” So the dark, red-wine-like color of coffee coupled with its appetite-suppressing effect are embodied in its name.
An underactive endogenous opioid system in the brains of those with a sweet tooth may help explain a possible connection with AUD. Because ethanol releases endorphins, which activate the opioid receptors, sweetliking people may be more prone to having an endorphin or opioid receptor deficiency and, if so, are therefore highly motivated to stimulate that pathway. In support of this idea, sweet-likers with AUD were more responsive to the use of the opioid receptor blocker naltrexone in a small clinical study — they craved ethanol less when given the drug than did sweet-disliking people with AUD.
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Humans have been using nicotine for thousands of years, along with arecoline (described below), caffeine, cathinone, cocaine, ethanol, ephedrine, morphine, and THC. Most of these drugs mimic the structure of a neurotransmitter or enhance their levels in the brain through other means.
later in life, survivors of childhood trauma like my father are more susceptible to using drugs of reward that activate these systems just to feel normal.
Addiction medicine specialist Gabor Maté points to four brain systems affected by parenting quality: the endorphin-based attachment-reward system for forming loving bonds, the dopamine-based system that motivates, the self-regulating behavior system based in the prefrontal cortex, and the stress-response system. Each system is controlled by a delicate balance of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. When this balance is disrupted, we often use external stimuli, or drugs of abuse, to compensate.
Chinese-European relations reveals that the Chinese Empire was the most prosperous on the planet by any measure, from its standard of living to the size of its population, which accounted for one-third of humanity at the time. The Chinese, along with the Europeans and Americans, all recognized China’s top status. And China’s arm’s-length imperial trade policy was one practice of many designed to protect its status. There was a reason the emperor forbade foreigners from learning Chinese.
a religious, millenarian sect in the hinterlands called the White Lotus
One perspective is that the British Empire’s rapacious desire for economic gain and hegemony led to the downfall of the most advanced civilizations the world had known.
