Can economics save Suriname rain forest?
Tropical forests have yielded 60 percent of the anti-cancer drugs discovered in the last 10 years April 7, 1998 Web posted at: 5:08 p.m. EDT (2108 GMT) By Environmental News Network staff (ENN) — By combining the ancient knowledge of shamans with modern chemical screening techniques and biotechnology, a consortium of chemists, conservationists and botanists have identified potential drugs in the rainforest of Suriname. The five-year project, led by David Kingston, a professor of chemistry at Virginia Tech, aims to discover new drugs to treat human ills and give the small South American country economic reasons to preserve the biodiversity of its forests. So far the researchers working on the Suriname biodiversity utilization and conservation project have identified one novel compound with anti-cancer activity that has made it through several stages of tests at Bristol-Meyers Squibb. After conducting some 14,000 assays of more than 3,300 extracts, Virginia Tech has identified 30 differ
