Only a fool would neglect to investigate further the abundant flora of the world for the presence of new drugs that will benefit not only the world, but also the fool. –Norman Farnsworth
Soejarto grew up in Indonesia, on the island of Java. A Dutch botanist at his agricultural college first got him interested in plant taxonomy, and a graduate professor at Harvard in the 1960s turned him toward economic botany and ethnobotany–studying not just the difference between one kind of plant and another, but their value to people as well.
Why roll ’em in nature’s pharmaceutical casino when organic chemists can whip up any compound you like in the lab? Because they can’t really, according to pharmacy dean Geoffrey Cordell. Twigs and fungi and microbes contain more different chemicals than human synthesizers can dream up. “There is no such thing as cranking out new synthetic drugs at random. Typically you do a chemical reaction with a particular compound in mind. But if you pick a few leaves from a tree, right there you have 300 or 400 compounds to test.”
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In person, Farnsworth could almost pass for a Chicago alderman, with his shock of white hair, his suspenders, the cigar clenched in his teeth, and his blunt talk. He is in fact head of the university’s Program for Collaborative Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and in his 24 years at UIC he’s hired most of his colleagues and some of his now-superiors. He is not afflicted with modesty or reticence: “I’m the university character, the eccentric, only because I speak my mind. I was one of the first 100 Americans to go to China in 1974. I’ve talked with the king and queen of Thailand and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. And I come back here and see these little administrators running around.”
Farnsworth acknowledges past fiascos that have scared drug companies away from plants, stories that could be called Nightmares of Interdisciplinary Research: the nonbotanist who carefully identified each newly collected plant by writing in ballpoint pen on the leaves, which dried and crumbled during shipment, rendering his samples worthless; the nonpharmacist who listed the traditional medicinal use of a plant as “contraceptive,” without mentioning which sex it was for.
In the fall of 1991, Soejarto got bad news from the NCI laboratory: those new Calophyllum samples didn’t contain any of the HIV-killing calanolide A the first one had. “It came as a shock to me,” he says. He realized that not being able to produce an identical sample could put his entire project in jeopardy. It’s one thing to have the results of an experiment surprise you. It’s another–much worse–to be unable to produce the same results from the same process. But surely somewhere he could find another specimen of Calophyllum lanigerum that produced calanolide A!
