Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge [View all]

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge (Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte PNAS 2021 Vol. 118 No. 24 e2103683118)

I was directed to this interesting paper by this article in popular press: Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants (Mongabay by Sibélia Zanon on 20 September 2021 | Translated by Maya Johnson) , which in turn came in my email from my Nature Briefing subscription.

It was my privilege to work in various capacities on the development of several drugs that were discovered originally in plants, two of the taxanes for cancer, originally found in Oregon Yew Tree bark, and irinotecan, originally obtained from the bark of the Chinese "Happy Tree." I supported a group working on the total synthesis. (It was very exciting.) I'm working with a team developing one now, but I can't talk about it.

Although many drugs have been obtained from molecules in plants, or derived from them, we have only scratched the surface of drugs available.

The paper linked above gives an interesting perspective about which I had not thought.

From the introduction:

Indigenous people have accumulated a sophisticated knowledge about plants and their services—including knowledge that confers significant health benefits (1)—that is encoded in their languages (2). Indigenous knowledge, however, is increasingly threatened by language loss (3) and species extinctions (4, 5). On one hand, language disuse is strongly associated with decreases in indigenous knowledge about plants (6). On the other hand, global change will constrain the geographic ranges of many human-utilized endemic plants and crops (7, 8). Together, language extinction and reductions in useful plant species within the coming century may limit the full potential of nature’s contributions to people and the discovery of unanticipated uses. So far, however, our understanding of the degree to which the loss of indigenous languages may result in the loss of linguistically unique knowledge and how this risk compares to that posed by ecological extinction has been limited (Fig. 1)...

Figure 1:



The caption:

Medicinal plant knowledge and its association with indigenous languages. The figure illustrates a regional pharmacy with remedies (jars with plants) cited by languages (jar labels). In this paper, we assess to what degree the knowledge contained in this pharmacy would be eroded by the extinction of either indigenous languages or plants.

Another image, Figure 2:



The caption:

Fig. 2.
Most medicinal knowledge is unique to a single language. Histograms depict the number of indigenous languages that cite a medicinal service. (A) North America. (B) Northwest Amazonia. (C) New Guinea. Red bars show medicinal plant services only known to one language. Dots within the maps indicate the distribution of languages.

The caption:

Fig. 3.
Distribution of unique knowledge across languages. Trees represent language phylogenies of North America (n = 119 languages) (A); northwest Amazonia (n = 37 languages) (B); and New Guinea (n = 80 languages) (C). Illustrations represent indigenous groups whose languages have the highest number of unique medicinal services per region. These languages are indicated by their corresponding numbers in the linguistic trees: 1, Cherokee; 2, Huron–Wyandot; 3, Navajo; 4, Ticuna; 5, Barasana–Eduria; 6, Cubeo; 7, Biak; 8, Lower Grand Valley Dani; and 9, Molima. Language names at phylogeny tips are abbreviated following Glottolog codes. For the list of language names and Glottolog codes, see SI Appendix, Table S2.

Figure 4:



The caption:

Distribution of unique knowledge across medicinal floras. Trees represent medicinal plant phylogenies of North America (n = 2,475 species) (A); northwest Amazonia (n = 645 species) (B); and New Guinea (n = 477 species) (C). Illustrations and their corresponding numbers show the plant species with more unique medicinal services per region. 1, Liriodendron tulipifera; 2, Persea borbonia; 3, Pinus glabra; 4, Tachigali paniculata; 5, Fittonia albivenis; 6, Tetrapterys styloptera; 7, Inocarpus fagifer; 8, Flagellaria indica; and 9, Cordyline fruticosa. All illustrations from www.plantillustrations.org belong to the public domain.

From the conclusion the paper:

Only about 6% of higher plants have been screened for biological activity (21). Therefore, assessing to what degree linguistically unique medicinal services are truly effective in the Western sense is beyond the scope of this paper. In many instances, these plants have been proven medicinally effective (12, 22⇓⇓⇓⇓–27), albeit there are also exceptions (28, 29). Regardless of that, here, we treat this knowledge as what it is: part of the cultural heritage of indigenous people.

The United Nations declared 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages to raise awareness about their importance for sustainable development and their endangerment across the world. Our study suggests that each indigenous language brings unique insights that may be complementary to other societies that seek potentially useful medicinal remedies. Therefore, the predicted extinction of up to 30% of indigenous languages by the end of the 21st century (3) would substantially compromise humanity’s capacity for medicinal discovery.

I'm not sure if the PNAS paper is open sourced, but the Mongabay article probably is.

Interesting I think.