Dr. Kinghorn started off his talking explain to us what Great Britain was and how the flag came to be. Then he talked about the use of plants in medicine. The world has 300,000 plants and 10,000 0f they are used for medicinal purposes. Around three-quarters of the world rely on these plants. Opium has been used since 250 BCE; the whole world tended to use it as a pain reviler medicine. Opium is extracted from a flower and that extract is used to make morphine.
Sir Joseph Banks was a botanist who traveled to Australia a studied the plants there. He later became the president of the Royal Society and established the Royal Botanic gardens. Ethnobotany is the relationship between man and his ambient vegetation. Ethnopharmacology deals with the medical use of plants. Dr. William Withering reported that the purple foxglove plant helps to treat edema in patients. Today, we use cardiac glycoside constituent because of Dr. Witherings study. Dr. William Daniell was an army surgeon who used a calabar bean in West Africa for interrogation. The bean has buccally, so when it was chewed it would kill the person who chewed it. Two famous botanists were Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and Andre Michaux. Both of them have plants named after them. 30,000 Alkaloids are known to science. Early scientific work on Alkaloids occurred in France. Joseph Gay-Lussac wrote about morphium and renamed in morphine.
I thought it was really interesting when Dr.Kinghorn mentioned his work in his talk. I really enjoined when he mentioned how long the medicine Camptothecin took 38 years for the FDA to approve the Drug.
Dr. Kinghorn also talked about how Cannabis is used in medicine. For example, cannabis can help with epilepsy and can help people with MS. The THC compound in cannabis can help anorexia and HIV. It’s interesting to hear the modern day debate between science and society, one side says it’s okay to use cannabis while another says it’s a taboo product.
I thought it was very nice of Dr. Kinghorn to teach us how to find The Tube and tell us about botanic gardens around London.