Purdue News
Purdue News
Academics have all the fun - especially Varro Tyler, recently retired Lilly Distinguished Professor of Pharmacognosy. He was relaxing with some students around a big table in a thatched hut in the Amazon rain forest when a mad boa constrictor dropped out of the ceiling. The snake smacked down on the table like a long, writhing salami. It was not a happy camper.
"Someone had gone after it with a machete, so it was very angry. You've never seen people scatter so fast," Tyler recalls with a laugh.
America's premier medicinal plant expert, usually based in West Lafayette, was in the Amazon teaching a group of pharmacists and physicians who were on a field trip through the jungles of northeast Peru.
To a pharmacognosist - someone versed in the science of medicinal plants - raw nature is the original drugstore. Aspirin came from willow bark; digitalis for the heart came from common foxglove.
"Plant drugs make up conventional medicine in two-thirds of the world. But in this country it's still classified as unconventional medicine," says Tyler, with a little heat.
Taming the wild botanicals
In America, herbal medicine got a bad name during the first half of this century,
when elixirs, pills and potions claimed to cure anything that ailed you. Included
in a group of slides Tyler brought along to show Prevention staffers is one of a
bottle of Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, a brew touted to be "good for everything." "But it was never
any closer to an Indian reservation than a chemical lab in New Haven, Conn.," he
says.
Today, herbal medicines may not have this "creative" labeling, but testimonials for herbal remedies still tend toward the mystical or folkloric.
Literature on the subject is often inaccurate; herbal claims are often "outrageous," Tyler says. "Paraherbalism" is the term he uses to describe the suspect branch of plant medicine that operates without a scientific net.
"Only 20 percent - maybe less - of the claims made for herbal medicinals in this country are valid," he says. "I want to see clinical studies - data, evidence - that an herbal product does what it says it does."
So Tyler has devoted much of his life to correcting errant herbalism and constructing what he calls rational herbalism. To that end, he's written two fine books to guide both professionals and consumers through the overwhelming phytomedicinal maze of the modern health-food market: "The Honest Herbal" and "Herbs of Choice." He's also written scientific textbooks, including the standard text "Pharmacognosy" (ninth edition), for which he was senior author. In all, Tyler has written 18 books, either in whole or in part, plus more than 270 scientific articles.
And he's been honored almost from the beginning of his career. Right after college, he spent a year as an Eli Lilly Research Fellow, studying plant science at Yale University. In 1966, he won the American Pharmaceutical Association Foundation Research Achievement Award in natural products for his work on the rye fungus (and migraine medicine) ergot. Just last year, Tyler was named Economic Botanist of the Year. In between, there were many more accolades and awards.
Mysteries of the apothecary
How did the 6-foot-tall scientist grow up to be the Hippocrates of herbs? One reason
was his hometown, a small riverbank farming community in Nebraska called Nebraska
City. Even though it contained only 7,000 people, it supported five drugstores. Pharmacies punctuated Tyler's everyday environment.
"I started to work in a pharmacy behind the soda fountain when I was 12. The boss was a very congenial man who wanted to show all the boys who worked for him some of the mysteries of the apothecary. So we would fill things like cold capsules, influenza capsules. Everything had to be powdered and mixed and encapsulated by hand. That really got me kind of interested in pharmacy."
Even his first name, which came to him by way of his country-doctor grandfather, has a medicinal ring to it.
"Varro was a Roman encyclopedist often credited with having invented germ theory. Long before microscopes, he thought that disease was caused by little animacules that infected people."
So if Varro Tyler hadn't gone into pharmaceutical studies, it would have been a surprise. But he accepted the nudge of fate, graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1949 and followed an inspiring pharmacognosist professor to the University of Connecticut, where he earned both master's and doctorate.
After school, he taught for a while at the University of Nebraska. Then he went out to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he fell in love with fungi, both to research and to eat. With fellow mycologists he stalked the Northwest forests, gathering chanterelles to cook into feasts. He also investigated the ergot that got him honored. "And ergot is still used for everything from migraine headaches to controlling postpartum hemorrhage," he says.
During sabbaticals, Tyler shared his pharmaceutical knowledge at the University of Singapore and the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. In 1963, he was a visiting professor at the Institut fur Biochemie der Pflanzen in Halle, Germany. That was an important posting. Germany is the country where herbal science is state of the art and where natural drugs are taught in medical schools. "I owe much of my ability in the field to my ability to read German. And I get over to Germany once or twice a year," he says.
After Seattle, Tyler came to Purdue, where he continued his herbal career and served as professor of pharmacognosy and dean of the Schools of Pharmacy, Nursing and Health Sciences. He also served as vice president of academic affairs. Just last year, inspiring future experts, he introduced a new course for his college students called Drugs From Nature.
Despite his achievements, honors and travels, Tyler still has one burning ambition: "I'd like to convince people that herbal medicine can be put on a useful scientific and clinical basis. I'd like to get it away from all the hype and hyperbole.
"I personally am convinced that so many of these plants can be very useful products, milder and less expensive than many of the drugs we have now. My ambition - the goal toward which I'd still like to work - is to see sensible regulations, properly implemented, that would control herbal drugs in this country. To go into a health-food store to buy a product, and not find on the label what a supplement is good for - what effects and side effects to expect - is wrong."
Reprinted by permission of Prevention magazine. Copyright 1997 Rodale Press, Inc. All rights reserved. For subscription information, call 1-800-666-2503.
More about Varro Tyler
PEAK EXPERIENCE: The canopy walk at ACEER in the Amazon rain forest. "You're 120 feet above the forest floor, where the vines bloom and all the plants flower."
FAVORITE HERB: Echinacea. "An itinerant purveyor of nostrums named Meyer introduced echinacea into medicine not far from my hometown, in Pawnee City, Neb. It's been used to overcome all kinds of infections. In the 1980s the Germans discovered that it acts by stimulating the immune system to help the body resist disease. Another reason I have a soft spot for echinacea is that it has isobutalamines - so if you chew it, they give you a buzzing, numbing sensation on your tongue."
MOST EXCITING NEW PLANT: Cat's claw, the root and bark of a plant that grows in Peru, where it's been used as a folk medicine forever. "The claim is that it has immune-modulating activity. And there are unproven claims that it's a remedy for everything from cancer to AIDS. It needs a lot of work to prove its benefits, but it's potentially the most important new botanical discovery of recent times."
HERBS THE DOCTOR USES: Echinacea when he feels a cold coming on. Chamomile tea (steeped 15 minutes to release the most phytochemicals) to settle an upset stomach.
OTHER PERSONA: Fellow, Royal Philatelic Society, London Writes a fortnightly column for "Linn's Stamp News" called "Focus on Forgeries."
LIFE THEME: "It's always been a kind of passion to discriminate the good from the bad." Besides specializing in the study of forged stamps, "I have an extensive library on all forms of fraud, including art fraud and antiques fraud. A colleague at "Linn's Stamp News" said I approach stamps and herbs in the same manner - demanding a rigorous scientific basis and the evidence to support what is said about it."
FAMILY: Wife, Ginny Demel; daughter, Jeanne (a pharmacist in Lafayette); son, David (head of the chemistry department at the University of Oregon in Eugene); two grandchildren.
TYPICAL QUOTE: "I'd like to see some studies - some evidence."
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; e-mail, purduenews@purdue.edu
