ABSTRACT
Walk into any pharmacy and ask to examine a bottle of prescription medicine chosen at random. There is a one in four chance that the medicine you hold in your hand has an active ingredient derived from a plant. Most of these plant-derived drugs were originally discovered through the study of traditional remedies and folk knowledge of indigenous peoples—the ethnobotanical approach. The late pharmacognosist Norman Farnsworth, of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois–Chicago, estimated that 89 plant-derived drugs currently prescribed in the industrialized world were discovered by studying folk knowledge.
