From Plant Press, Vol. 12, No. 1, from January 2009.
Biological diversity, including plants, is currently under strong pressure, as many species are threatened with extinction. This phenomenon affects also the knowledge about the plants and their possible uses, alimentary, medicinal or others. The threat of disappearance becomes even more severe when knowledge about the plants was written in an endangered language. Several human groups over time, however, described their vegetal environment in written texts, analyzed the plants and created taxonomical systems, and eventually recorded their alimentary, medicinal, cosmetic and decorative uses of plants.
Such knowledge, which came from the dawn of human history and handed down through generations, was recorded in writing at some point in time, and then faithfully transmitted without interruption until the dawn of printing and modern science. Although many such documents have been destroyed over time, thousands have survived. These unique and irreplaceable pieces are now preserved in rare book rooms of libraries across the world such as the Vatican Library in Rome, the British Library in London, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Suleymaniye Library in Istanbul. However carefully preserved they might be, these documents are exposed to the unavoidable damage resulting from time. Additionally, they are not always easily accessible to scholars, and, in many cases, their handwriting is difficult to decipher. The information contained in these works needs to be properly understood and interpreted.
To conduct and foster research on these maters, Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti have created the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions (IPMT), which is hosted in the Department of Botany. It is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) center for innovative research on the recovery, preservation, and study of ancient botanical and medical traditions. With the library resources of the Historia Plantarum collection (12,000+ items), and in collaboration with libraries, museums and research centers across the world, IPMT will host in-house research, support extra-mural programs, and provide teaching for students (be it at the Smithsonian or at their own universities) and expertise for the scientific community.
To prevent the loss of the ancient body of knowledge, Touwaide and Appetiti have have created an unprecedented repository of knowledge made of three major collections of data and aimed at bringing ancient botanical knowledge and medical expertise from the shelves of libraries to the desk of scientists and benches of laboratories. The first collection contains images of books (written by hand or printed) from libraries across the world that have been systematically inventoried and analyzed on site. The resulting digital images of these books have been systematically identified, databased, and provided with meta-data on the book they come from, the plant(s) they analyze, and the uses of such plants they report. The second collection is a digital library, which contains the text of the books recorded and digitized in the first collection. Several such texts have been or are currently being digitized in the original language, in a searchable format, to make multiple types of searches possible. The third collection is a series of computerized databases containing scientific information from the texts. Relevant data are extracted from the texts and reformatted to be recorded in the databases and retrieved in different ways. These three collections will be linked with each other, to make it possible to start from a certain book, to see its scanned pages, to read its text in a computerized version (instead of the possibly undecipherable calligraphy of the copyist on the image of the book), and to have its information available in a systematically organized way.
In the first phase, IPMT will focus on Mediterranean botanical and medical traditions, capitalizing on Touwaide’s and Appetiti’s primary research. This phase includes the Flora of Classical Antiquity, a world catalogue of Greek manuscripts with botanical treatises and medical texts on plant medicines, a Web site on botanical illustration during the first centuries of printing, research in the collections of the US National Herbarium, field work to locate specimens (dry and living) of plants mentioned in the texts, and laboratory analysis of plant remains from archeological sites. The data produced in this phase were the result of Touwaide and Appetiti’s research in libraries, archeological sites, and research centers across the world. Touwaide and Appetiti have signed agreements of collaborations with many of these institutions in order to create a consortium.
Later on, IPMT will conduct, encourage, and host research on other botanical and medical traditions in order to cross-reference botanical knowledge and uses of plants across time and space. This phase will include research of the so-called Unani medicine of India, where the troops of Alexander the Great imported ancient Greek science in the 4th century B.C. and contributed to enrich the local tradition, and China, where the Mediterranean botanical and medical knowledge arrived in the 13th century through the intermediary of the Arabic World.
The resources accumulated are unique reference works for the scientific community. IPMThas already received several invitations to collaborate in new research programs such as the analysis of human tissue from Egyptian mummies to possibly identify the plants these people consumed, be it as alimentary substances or as medicines; similarly the analysis of plant and human remains from archeological sites such as Mycenae in order to reconstruct the diet of an early Mediterranean population; and a new project to grow seeds from archaeological sites of 2,500 years ago, to assess the possible variation of plant species over time, offering a significant contribution to our understanding of the plant world.
By its innovative and cross-disciplinary nature, the research promoted by IPMTwill open new avenues for the understanding of the natural environment and its biological diversity and diversification, together with the interaction between humans and plants, and the construction of knowledge, be it medical or botanical, among different cultures. This without mentioning the cataloguing and preservation of a wealth of documentation threatened with extinction, and a humankind’s heritage of knowledge exposed to oblivion.
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