With some melancholy, I also note that Halloween 2017 marks the shuttering of ScienceBlogs, the first major blogging network featuring scientists, launched in January 2006 by Seed Media Group. The fact that plants and other organisms make chemicals that affect human biology triggered my own interests in this field. Over nearly 30 years of working in pharmacology and toxicology, I spent the bulk of my time working with chemists far more talented than I trying to discern if the natural world held more anticancer drugs for us.ĭid this post pique your interest? You can learn more about the colorful convergence of drugs and history - you owe yourself the indulgence of John Mann's book. I never cease to be amazed or impressed by how much of our folk history is influenced by drugs from nature - natural products - used in cultural or medical rituals. I was honored to work from 2002 to 2008 with the two gents who isolated Taxol from the Pacific yew and showed its anticancer activity, the late Monroe Wall, PhD, and Mansukh Wani, PhD. It works this way in everyone, not just witches. Horwitz and her then-doctoral student, Peter Schiff, and Jane Fant, published in Nature the seminal report demonstrating that taxol acts by promoting microtubule polymerization to the point that tumor cells cannot coordinate chromosomal segregation. So, these psychosensory experiences of flying were associated with boiled up hallucinogenic plants applied to the vulvovaginal area with a broomstick, probably used to mix the concoction.Īn aside: Legendary pharmacologist, Susan Band Horwitz, PhD, reminded me a few years ago that the same passage from Macbeth quoted above also contains a reference to the source of one of our most useful natural product anticancer drugs, paclitaxel (Taxol). At the same time I experienced an intoxicating sensation of flying.I soared where my hallucinations - the clouds, the lowering sky, herds of beasts, falling leaves.billowing streamers of steam and rivers of molten metal - were swirling along." Each part of my body seemed to be going off on its own, and I was seized with the fear that I was falling apart. "My teeth were clenched, and a dizzied rage took possession of me.but I also know that I was permeated by a peculiar sense of well-being connected with the crazy sensation that my feet were growing lighter, expanding and breaking loose from my own body. The tropane alkaloid hallucinogens tended to cause sleep, but with dreams that involved flying, "wild rides" and "frenzied dancing." A 1966 description of tropane alkaloid intoxication was offered by the Gustav Schenk: Note the administration of the salve." Credit: Wellcome Institute Library, London Wellcome Instituteīut what about the issue of flying on said broomsticks? Shown in Mann's book with the caption, "A seventeenth-century engraving of a witch being prepared. These passages account for why so many of the pictures of the time depict partially clothed or naked witches "astride their broomsticks," as shown in the woodcut image featured here. "But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places." "In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin."Īnd from the fifteenth-century records of Jordanes de Bergamo: Just how did the alleged witches apply said ointments? According to Mann, the earliest clue comes from a 1324 investigation of the case of Lady Alice Kyteler: So, the vulvovaginal and axial means of application detailed below are the ones that truly overcome first-pass hepatic metabolism.) (For my front-row students who always kept me on my toes, some pharmacology texts state that rectal drug administration does expose as much as half of the absorbed drug to first pass metabolism as the superior hemorrhagic vein drains into the mesenteric circulation. lady young woman mopping floor, holding mop jumping flying on white background." Each generation has appropriated the image of a woman astride a broomstick or, in this case, a mop. This stock image from Shutterstock carries the caption, "Cleanup housework concept.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |