Stuff You Should Know - Ethnobotany: How to Get Drugs from Plants

Episode Date: August 5, 2011

In 1820, most of the drugs listed in the American Pharmacopoeia were plant-based; by 1960, it was a mere 5 percent. Yet in the late 20th century this trend reversed. Why? Join Josh and Chuck as they get to the root of ethnobotany and plant-based medicine. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know from our beloved website, HowStuffWorks.com. That's right. We work for a website. And did you know that? Yeah, you know, when people ask me

what I do, like, I don't know, I met some friend at M.W.C. the other day and she's like, what do you do? I always just say, I work for a website. And it starts in on stuff and I'm just like, I work for a website. It's easy that way. Not only do you work for it, you are the website is what you should say. I have lobbied for Chuck, HowChuckWorks.com. People would sign on to that, man. This would have been a much better way to start out the future of the internet one, huh? Yeah, probably so. Instead, we're going to go back. Way back, Chuck. Back in time. Was that Huey Lewis? Sort of. He's playing tomorrow night or tonight. Where? I think he's doing Chastain. He's doing like, you know, the Memphis Stacks Music,

Memphis Soul show. What? Along with your favorite Huey Lewis classics. What? I did not know this. How did you not tell me this? I didn't know. Would you be seriously wondering? I would totally go see Huey Lewis. Dude, have you ever heard sports? Yeah, I had sports when I was working. It's one of the greatest albums ever released. It was one of the top albums of that year. From beginning to finish. That was a great album. Anyway, yes, I would see Huey Lewis and now I figure out how to get there in a few hours. I don't know if it's tonight, but I heard a promo for it today on the radio. So it's good to know. Well, Chuck, we're going to go even further back than the height of Huey Lewis's career. We're going to go several thousand years before that.

Okay. No, we'll go back to about the height of Huey Lewis's career. Maybe a little before it. When I was a young lad and I was watching TV and remember those time life books that we talked about here or there? Oh, yeah. Love them. So there was one set that it was like mysteries of mankind or mysteries of history or something like that. And I remember clearly it said, how could ancient civilizations perform brain surgery and patients survive? And there's this kind of like bearded almost caveman looking guy like with like a scar on his head. And he looks at the camera like, yeah, I'm still alive, but it hurts, you know? Yeah. I saw that and I went, it just captured me, right? Right. Well, I came to find out that that was a real thing.

And that apart from a lot of the stuff you find in time life books, it was correct. There's such a thing as trepanation and people actually did survive it. Yeah. What do we talk about this in the lobotomies? I think so. Because I know we've had two of them. But trepanation has been around as a surgical procedure. It's brain surgery in that the brain is affected by it. Sometimes they went in and poked around, but for the most part, it was just cutting away a piece of the skull and the scalp to relieve pressure on the brain. Yeah. Right. And they did the same thing in a much more sophisticated way these days.

Sure. For like swelling of the brain. Right. And some traditional societies still carry out trepanation today. Yeah. But as I said, it was successful. Some Andean cultures showed evidence of like at 80% success rate, which is pretty good as far as I know 70%. Right. Not bad. But this is a really ancient procedure. This is Neolithic. Right. 7000 to 2000 BC. That's a long time ago. Yeah. That's like four to 9000 years ago. And if you think about that, four to 9000 years ago, if they could successfully, 70% of the time, they could successfully open your skull up. Well, they could do that with 100% success rate. It was you living.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. But they could remove your heart. They could do all kinds of things. Just pull it right out. 100% success rate. So trepanation is this ancient form of surgery. And about the same time probably, people started figuring out that not only could they perform surgery, but if they wanted to, they could hang their shingle out and practice medicine if they knew what they were talking about with plants. Yeah. Right. That's right. Right. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs, America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a

2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that will piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Not too long ago, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, this explorer stumbled upon something that would change his life. I saw it and I saw, oh, wow, this is a very unusual situation. It was cacao, the tree that gives us chocolate. But this cacao was unlike anything experts had seen or tasted. I've never wanted us to have a gun fight. I mean, you saw the stacks of cash in our office. Chocolate sort of forms this vortex. It sucks you in. Like I can be the queen of wild chocolate. We were all lost. It was madness. It was a game changer. People quit their jobs. They left their lives behind so they could search for more of this stuff. I wanted to tell their

stories. So I followed them deep into the jungle and it wasn't always pretty. Basically, this like disgruntled guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes. And we've heard all sorts of things that somebody got shot over this. Sometimes I think all this for a damn bar of chocolate. Listen to obsessions, wild chocolate on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So for a long time, we suspect indigenous groups had some sort of idea understanding about what plants were, what plants could be used for. That's right. But then about 1500 BC, there was this explosion, right? Yes. This was after the ancient Egyptians and Pharaohs poked around the Sumerians with medicinal plants. China, Africa and India. That's when it really

exploded and they actually started to list these things and put them down on paper or whatever they were using at the time to papyrus. Well, in Egypt, in Chemite, if you want to be technical, there's a papyrus that's dated to 1553 BC that lists 700 different drugs. A lot of which are plant-based. Probably almost all, yeah. I would say so. They weren't doing synthetic chemical spectrum, were they? No. But about that same time, like you said, in Africa and India and China, all these people started just jotting down their understandings of plants and it was extensive, right? Yeah, rub this on your sore that and it will ease your pain and suffering. Exactly. So we should write that down. A lot of trial and error, I imagine.

Isn't that Shaq's line from that icy hot ad? Rub this there and it'll ease your pain. I think so. Do it. Can you dig it? So this understanding, this knowledge was added to and subtracted from, you know, over the course of centuries and millennia. Yeah. And then about like the 19th century, there was like a sharp divergence, right? Yes, Josh. That is when in the first edition of the American Pharmacopia, early 1800s, drugs at the time were 70% plant-based. Flash forward 1960, only 5.3 were plant-based. So what happens is you've introduced people that could figure out how to synthetically duplicate a lot of these plants. Right. So are they still plant-based? Does that even count? After a while, I think it's kind of like, you know, how people

say like, this is me with our product not tested on animals. Right. That's because it uses stuff that's that was tested on animals 30 years ago and found safe. Okay. So it's no longer. Yeah, sure. So I think it's much the same way where once you synthesize something enough for you know a synthetic alkaloid has this effect, you can use it in all these different ways or with something else. Right. That makes sense. So that was a that represented a real separation from the West and traditional cultures. Right. This is medicinal rift is what I just called it. Yeah. So kind of like medicinal rift. Yeah. As our understanding of chemistry and the effects of drugs on the body grew, then you know, we just kind of diverged from traditional societies. But

there came to be an awareness at some point in time that all of these rainforests that were destroying and all of the uncontacted tribes that were running out have a wealth of information. Yeah. That wasn't listed in these early pharmacopias. Right. Sure. That there's a bunch of understanding of how to cure all sorts of diseases out there and we kind of need it. So out of that has grown this whole field, the sub discipline of anthropology called ethnobotany. Yeah. What was the Connery movie? They were searching for the cure for cancer in the jungle. Rangoon beyond Rangoon. No, that was a Rangoon man. No, I can't remember the name of it. Attack of the Rangoon. It was the lady from the Sopranos and Goodfellas and then Sean Connery and they were in the jungle,

I think, searching for a cure for cancer or something. Good movie. But that's the point, though, is that the cure for cancer may be out there in some leaf that we just need to locate and synthesize. Right. The problem is like the field of ethnobotany isn't training people to go out and eat leaves and write down their thoughts on it. No, I guess they're interviewing people, local tribesmen, indigenous folks and saying, hey, tell us what you know about medicine. Right. Maybe we can learn something from that. And this is a very, very long process. So like an ethnobotanist is probably going to be somebody who is trained as a botanist in undergraduate school and then trained in anthropology, linguistics, possibly chemistry

in grad school. Got to be a people person. Yeah. You have to be able to chat it up with possible head shrinkers. Sure. And you go out in the field and you have to gain the trust of the people who have this information. It might not be common to the whole tribe. So you have to gain the trust of the person who knows what plant to use for what and then get that information from them in a way that's agreeable. There's a debate among ethnobotany that's pretty much resolved these days. But for a long time, the end justified the means. Like if you could cure athlete's foot with this plant and this guy doesn't want to give it to you, don't you have a moral obligation to basically take that information from them? Right.

Steal it, as it were. Now there's a movement toward making sure that these people are, like their trust isn't broken, that they're willing to share it. And if they're not willing to share it, they pay them. Pay them money. Pay them either way. Chequals. Compensation is kind of becoming a more of a thing among ethnobotanists rather than, thank you. You've done something great here. Bring in the trucks. Yeah. Well, not only just what the plant is though, but obviously they need specifics. They need to know what part of the plant because, you know, I wrote that article a while back on how you can, I think the universal edibility test, you know, some parts of a plant like eat the leaf and you can sustain on it, eat the root and you die in 10 seconds. So what part

of the plant, how much of it to use, which would essentially be the prescription. Right. And so the ethnobotanist finds the stuff out, takes it back to the synthetic chemist who basically has to go over the, you know, hopefully the ethnobotanist is like, it's the leaves. Just focus on the leaves rather than, you know, having to do this on the plant and the stems and the seeds or the flowers or whatever. What a crazy job. Imagine how difficult that is. It is very difficult to synthesize something like that. Well, first they have to isolate it. Oh, they got to find out what it is. Because, you know, the local shaman isn't, he's not going to be like, well, it's this alkaloid in there that's, you know, going to really get you off. Right. Anybody get off of me and healing

you. Exactly. It's the synthetic chemist who isolates the active ingredient. Right. And then figures out if they can put together a synthetic version of it, because one way to get medicine from plants is simple extraction. Right. But that's not the most reliable. No, because you can extract let's say the essential oils from one, one bit and it might be like really, really potent and another bit might not be. So it's not like, it's not consistent across the board. Right. And if one bit makes it into one jar of that stuff, and the other bit makes it into one, somebody who's in pain is not going to get any relief. The other person is going to die. Yeah. Because they're going to get like 80 times. Or feel really, really good depending on what happens. So

synthesis is the artificial synthesis is the preferred means of figuring out how to make a reasonable facsimile of this, what's in the plant. You're trying to mimic the compounds. Yeah. And I'm wondering like if you make it and it's the same thing, it has the same molecular structure as what's found in the plant, but you made it in the lab. It's still the same thing, right? It's like a test tube baby. Like you're the baby is still a real human. This is still a real compound. I guess on a molecular level, sure. But yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. Somebody much smarter than us probably is like, Oh, boys, I'll send you an email. Right. I'll let you know. I'm looking forward to that one. I have to say me too. And cheapness is the other

reason. Expense. Yes. Well, it's cheaper to synthesize something. Yeah. Once you figure it out. I'm sure it's a very long expensive process. But once you figure it out, you're like, Yeah, he has put a couple hydrogens in with that helium and want to stand back. Yeah. And better for the environment too. Like if something has to stay plant based, you're going to need a lot of that plant. That's true. You know what I'm saying? So we have a lot of success stories in synthesizing drugs from plants, right? Quinine, a part of one of my favorite drinks. Gin and tonic. You know it. Quinine's pretty. Yeah. Across the board. A pretty awesome thing, I guess. Yeah. That's why tonic water is called tonic water because it has quinine in it. Yeah. And it's a tonic for malaria.

Yeah. It's very small amount. But I guess it gives it that signature taste. And don't go with the diet. It's awful. There's a diet tonic. Oh, yeah. It's not very good. You know, I taste that is super bitter. Remember when we did the How Taste Works article? I figured out that I am a super taster of bitterness. Like I can barely tolerate tonic water. It's so bitter. Really? Yeah. And compari don't even get me started. But sometimes I torture myself and just have some anyway. I have compari in tonic. I've never mixed it with tonic. I think my head would explode. So quinine is used to treat malaria. Right. Based on the cinchona bark. Then you got, let's say another example, dioxin. I'm sorry, dioxin. Treating heart conditions. And that comes from the lovely foxglove. The lovely,

lovely foxglove that you grow in your garden. We do grow it in my garden, although my foxglove is dead right now. It's kind of depressing. Is it? Yes, it is. Very dead. Oh, no, I meant depressing. Yeah, of course. Look at dead plants. It's awful. Why? Are you not watering it frequently? No, I don't know what the deal was with the foxglove. You might not have transplanted it soon enough, or it might not do well in 110 heat index heat. Huh. Is there not enough shade? Sort of shady. Emily's the gardener. I'm just the gardener's assistant. I got you. The heavy lifter. Another great example that you listed. This is your article, right? Yeah. Okay. Is morphine. Yeah. The alkaloid from poppy plants was synthesized into diacetylmorphine and sold

commercially by Bayer for 12 years as heroin. Yeah, that's where heroin came from. Called heroin. Yeah. I'm just going to go to the drugstore and get some heroin. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And what's crazy is the heroin that's created today, you can make a case, is synthesized every time a batch is made, because it's derived from the opium poppy. But then you screw with it a little bit to make something different, slightly different. So, but yes, Bayer invented heroin. Wow. It's amazing. And then Bayer also invented aspirin, which is derived from willow bark. That's right. And are you going to say acetylsalic acid? Nice. Okay. Good going. That's aspirin. What's the natural compound?

Salicin. Yeah, salicin. And that was, that was, everybody's known about willow bark for, at least in sepocrates who wrote about it. And he was a Greek and he lived in probably like the third century BC, fourth century BC. Yeah. I wish we used zero more in this culture. It's so screwy. I know, but I love it. Anytime you're trying to place a time like this, you always kind of give this look up like you're trying to remember hanging out with that person. Like fourth thing. No, I think that was third century, if I remember correctly. Yeah. So yeah, it was, I mean, it was an anti-inflammatory and a fever reducer way back then. Still is. And that's one of the cool things when you, people that poo poo

Eastern medicine and things, it's like a lot of the stuff we use today is just a synthesized version of rubbing bark on your face. And a lot, a lot, a lot more than you'd think. Eldopa, which is used to treat Parkinson's derived from a plant. There's a whole awesome list. If you, if you search plants, synthesized drugs or drugs, synthesized plants and a search engine, I think the first results going to be this list from like the year 2000 of modern drugs that were derived from plants. Yes. And possibly my all time favorite volume was derived from Valyrian root, which I found out and just started taking a lot of Valyrian root. No, you can make a tea from it. And it's, uh, does it show you up?

Really? Yeah. I'm gonna have to do that. It will knock you out too. Really? Valyrian tea? It's too concentrated. Wow. But it stinks to high heaven. And I want to COA right now. I am not in any way, shape, or form recommending anyone try anything that I ever say that I do ever. Even like Valyrian root tea. That's like, that's in a supplement store, right? It is, but you know what? That's funny. You're saying that because I was listening to why doesn't the FDA regulate herbs? Yeah. And we had this conversation, right? That it's like, because it's in a natural food store, we just think that it's like,

oh, it's fine. It's harmless, but you could totally OD on any number of things in a natural food store. It's because the FDA doesn't regulate it that it appears harmless even though it is. Creating bulk. Yeah. This brings up a point, Josh, that I think have always believed that there is no disease that wherein the cure is not somewhere on the planet Earth. Oh, is that you believe that? I've always thought that, and this, you know, this is true. Look at all like every plant that is eventually synthesized into medicine. I think the answers are all out there. It's just a matter of finding them.

It's God's great scavenger hunt. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. I like that idea. Okay. I've been hitting you with the humdingers lately, haven't I? Yes, you are. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Not too long ago, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, this explorer stumbled upon something that would change his life. I saw it and I saw, oh, wow, this is a very unusual situation. It was cacao, the tree that gives us chocolate. But this cacao was unlike anything experts had seen or tasted. I've never wanted us to have a gun fight. I mean, you saw the stacks of cash in our office. Chocolate sort of forms this vortex. It sucks you in. Like I can be the queen of wild chocolate. We were all lost. It was madness. It was a game changer. People quit their jobs. They left their lives behind so they could search for more of this stuff. I wanted to tell their

stories. So I followed them deep into the jungle and it wasn't always pretty. Basically, this like disgruntled guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes. And we've heard all sorts of things that, you know, somebody got shot over this. Sometimes I think all, all this for a damn bar of chocolate. Listen to obsessions, wild chocolate on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So you can kind of see Asperin's been around for a while. Heroin's been around for a while. Tonic's been around for a while. We're still making stuff from plants. But we've also figured out another way to use plants for medicine. And that's to use like enzymes from the plants as catalysts in chemical reactions. You sell those little

Petri dishes almost. Yeah, basically, if you want to carry out a chemical reaction in a safe environment, inject it into a plant cell. It's a great little house for it. And the little factories, they make all sorts of stuff we need in chemical reactions to synthesize drugs. So they help in all sorts of ways. So up with plants. Yes, but not just plants, Chuck. Not just plants that we might like to just chew on once in a while like Valyrian, right? Yeah. But also poisons for just as long as medicinal plants have been used as drugs. We've also used poisons as well. Yeah, that papyrus you were talking about from Luxor, Egypt that listed all the drugs and plant-based drugs. It also listed a lot of poisons and a lot of antidotes to those poisons.

Yeah, because I mean, once we figured out there's such things as poison, we started looking for ways to cure them, right? And that kind of follows your logic that there's an antidote to every poison. Yeah, right? For every malady. I believe that. And not because of any like deep research, but just because of things like this and because I think the earth is structured that way. Yes. Balance. Right. But even before that, homeostasis. Yes. Even before that papyrus though, about 1500 years before it, there was a Kemite Egyptian pharaoh named Meniz and he was the first person documented to conduct research into poisons. Yeah, because they'd killed people with poison for years. Yeah. Socrates was famously killed in 399 BC. That was the fourth century. I wonder

how they first discovered that some poisons could actually heal you. I don't know. Maybe by killing someone, maybe right before they died, they were like, geez, my back feels great all of a sudden. Right. And they're like, oh, then they die. Yeah. I don't know. Just an idea. We have had a lot of hair brain ideas of what can cure you. Yeah. Like whiskey to cure a snake bite, right? Yeah, if you're in the old West, pour some whiskey on it. Right. So in the 1920s, some Brazilian researchers put that to the test and found that not only is it patently untrue, but it actually makes things worse. Yeah. Speeds up the blood flow. Yeah. The alcohol does. So the delivery of the venom is just much quicker. Yeah. I think the whiskey remedy I would choose is here, drink a lot of this

because you've been bitten by a snake and you're going to die. Right. So you might as well just numb the pain. Yeah. And no one, no one ever had a patient where it actually worked. They just heard of a patient where it worked. That's right. Right. But the same Brazilian doctors came up with a way to cure a snake bite, didn't they? Yeah. And this is amazing to me too. Everyone knows about anti-venom, which most people call anti-venom. It's been in. It is. But although I think I've heard seen venom is acceptable now because so many people use it or something. Well, some of our linguist friends and more progressive ones are like, just let language go where it's going. Exactly. Decimate, for instance. What they found out was

they can use poison to fight poison. So by injecting a snake's venom into something large that can take it like a horse, it would build up an immune system. I bet there was some trial and error there too. Yeah. But I can't just see where they're like, they inject the horse with some venom and go around to its face and punch it. So they would inject it into the horse, punch it in the face, and then the horse would eventually build up an immunity and produce antibodies called anti-venom. And then they would extract that from the horse. Extract the hemoglobin from the blood. Now we got an anti-venom that we can use on humans. Right. And so the anti-venom, those antibodies, when somebody is bit by a snake, when you use the anti-venom that's derived from

that snake's venom, those antibodies go into the human, find the antibodies or find the venom and cling to it so that it can't do anything. It's like, get off me. Yeah. No, I'll never let you go. And I want to know how that first started too. Who was the first person that thought maybe this poison that kills us can heal us? These Brazilian doctors were the first ones. So let's inject it into a horse and just see. It's just amazing to have that spark. That was logical because think about it. I mean, it's so massive. No, that makes sense. But just the initial idea of the spark of curiosity, which we always talk about, it's pretty amazing. Gorgeous. Yeah. So Chuck, if you, no one knows this yet,

this is the big secret, but this podcast, this episode is based on two articles. And did you find the common thread between the two articles? Sean Connery? No. Willie Nilly. I used Willie Nilly in both articles. You say that a lot though. I could see that. But did you know Willie Nilly's hyphenated? I did. I thought it was capitalized like a name. Just the Willie part is capitalized. Willie Nilly. So these Brazilian doctors figured that out, right? They were not the first to figure out that, hey, this thing that kills me could also kill me. Make me stronger? Right. Yes. In a certain way. At the very least, this is very, this part using poisons, right? To cure other problems is very logical. It's saying this poison does this and this malady

does the opposite. So if you apply this poison to this malady, it should bring you back to homeostasis. Yeah. Hopefully. Which is what we're all searching for. And one of the first guys to follow this reasoning to the very dangerous conclusion of here, take this deadly nightshade was a Scottish researcher named Thomas Frazier. Are you going to try this word? Acetylcholine Stareis inhibitor. Wow. Thank you. You practiced that one. That was the first time I said it out loud, although I mouthed it a few times. Well, he is atropine as that thing that you just said that's found in deadly nightshade, Belladonna, a very potent hallucinogen, a very dangerous poison as well. And this atropine, which is an active ingredient, contains an alkaloid

that this Thomas Frazier figured out combats the effects of anthrax. Yeah. So anthrax and serongas, similarly, they're both nerve toxins. And the way that they kill you, this is horrible. I know. It's unbelievable. So like you have this thing called acetylcholine stareis. And it's a normal enzyme in your body that basically tells your neurons to fire, your nerves fire because it says, hey, go fire. And it breaks down naturally. What serin and anthrax do is they prevent it from being broken out and it just hangs out in your synapses and tells your nerves to keep firing and firing and firing. And your body just overloads on electrical charges. Yeah. And you die very painfully. Very painfully because you feel

everything because all the nerves in your body are firing way more than they should be. So what what Scottish physician Thomas Frazier figured out is that atropine is an acetylcholine stareis inhibitor. So it goes in and basically binds the receptors where the acetylcholine stareis would normally bind itself and hence atropine, this poison, can prevent the effects of anthrax and serin. And that's still used today. Ironically from the deadly nightshade plant. Yeah. The whole concept of using poison as medicine is just dripping with irony. It is. It is, Josh. Another thing they're doing these days at the University of Buffalo is they are using chalan tarantula, rose tarantula to combat heart attack death.

So cell walls have these little channels that open when the cell stretches and they basically help to contract and release your heart muscles or probably just contract. Well, they channel the ions through. These are ion channels. The ions give it the electrical signal. So it's part of the pumping. Right. But if these things get too wide, there'll be too many positive ions and that is basically what could potentially lead to a heart attack. Right. Because it throws off the rhythm. Yeah. And your heart attack is just an arrhythmic heartbeat. So this tarantula venom binds to these channels and blocks it from passing through and potentially saves people from heart attacks. Tarantula venom. Yeah. And scorpions.

Yeah. I told you I knew someone who was undergoing that therapy. We talked about that with the most venomous creature on earth one. I thought we did. Yeah. And I tried to find research on him today to see if he is still fighting his fight with cancer and I could not find out, but there's a guy I could ask. Okay. And I got a lot of hope. This guy was a big inspiration for me. Well, it's good. Let me know. Let everybody know. I will. Unless it's bad news and then I will just not speak of it. But what we were talking about is scorpion venom is being used to treat, in his case, brain cancer, the Israeli yellow scorpion. And it has a protein that binds itself to cancerous cells found in gliomas. And that is brain cancer, actually. Yeah. And it basically

keeps it from replicating itself, keeps these cells from spreading. Well, it does. And they also figured out that you can attach a basically a radioactive iodine to this venom, the protein found in the venom. And so the venom goes and seeks out the glioma and it brings with it along for the ride, this radioactive iodine. And as we all know, cancer cells don't like radiation. So it basically seeks and destroys. Now it's like a vehicle for it. It is. Is this the iron oxide nanoparticles? I don't know. All right, here's the deal. This is what I got. Chlorotoxin is the chemical that affects the protein. And the protein is what helps spread the cancer. This is new, I think. They have a new study where they got

chemically bonded iron oxide nanoparticles. Okay. They put that with a lab made version of the chlorotoxin. Okay. And they created these nanoprobes. Each nanoprobe can carry 20 chlorotoxin molecules. Did they paint like a 40s pinup girl on the front of each one? That's basically what it is. So a tumor cell uptakes a single nanoparticle. It's absorbing a lot of this chlorotoxin at once. So basically, they did this on mice and they found that with the nanoparticles or the nanoprobes that they're using, it fights the tumor by 98% compared to 45% of just the venom. So I guess they've given it a little super car that can hold a lot of this stuff in the trunk. That is really cool. Yeah. Good. Up with mice, huh? Up with mice,

up with scorpion venom, down with cancer. Right. Well, you got anything else? I do not. I don't either, Chuck. I think this turned out better than I thought. Oh yeah? This turned out exactly how I hoped it would. Really? Yeah, I thought it was going to be great and it was. That was very nice. If you want to check out these two articles, you can type in poison medicine and plant medicine into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and it will bring both of them up along with a bunch of other cool stuff in our wonderful search page. And since I said search bar, you know that means it's time for what? Facebook question and answer session. Very nice. We do this from time to time, Josh. We throw it on Facebook. Hey,

ask us anything. We'll zip through as many of these as we can in the next couple of episodes. I like how people do ask us anything and then we ignore it. Yeah. A lot of it. Save these, by the way, because we may not be done with these. I printed them out for us. Go ahead. You take the first one. This one's from Cyrus Brohas, the time when it pronounced his name. Do you guys really have cubes right next to each other at the office? Not only do we have cubes right next to each other now. Chuck, you moved and we're like, we don't share a wall anymore, but there's nothing but open space between us. Yeah, I'm behind you and you are behind me. We're like five feet from one another. Yeah. So I did not like it first. It was not,

so I disliked it. It was just weird, man. I knew it was so weird. So now I spend my days just kind of staring at Chuck while he researches and things. Yeah. Yeah. This is from Emily Tran, what has been your most interesting or memorable dream to date. I, Emily, have celebrity dreams all the time where I am really good buddies with Larry David or Jack Black or whoever my heroes are. That's awesome. And they're really realistic and always wake up and very disappointed that that's not the case. You have some friendships with some of your heroes and David actually? Yeah, sure. But not Larry David. Maybe one day. Maybe one day. What about you? Got a memorable dream? Yeah, I do. I don't remember the dream, but I'm going to bring you me in here on this one.

She tells me that for three nights in a row, I would sit up and point at the ceiling and be like, what's that kid doing up there? And she'd be like, what are you talking about? And we'd very thoroughly look and there'd be nothing there, of course. And she'd be like, what do you mean? And I got nothing to go back to sleep. I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Your house might be haunted, dude. I have no idea what that dream was or anything like that. So, but there's a kid like in our ceiling for three nights in a row. Tom Blake, there's a bustle in my head row. What should I do? I think everyone knows the answer. Don't be alarmed. Yeah, technically, that's a first step, though. That's like first don't be alarmed, then something. Right. So,

what comes after that? I don't know. We'll have to ask Jimmy Page or maybe Robert Plain wrote that. I say go back inside. Go into your house. Okay. And beware the child on the ceiling. What country would you like to live in other than the States? I've always wanted to live in Spain. I think Spain would be really neat to live in. Oh, yeah? Although their government is in so much turmoil and they have like a whole separatist region. If everybody could just mellow out in Spain, I'd move there. I would drop out. You'd never hear from me again. I'd be on some island or something. Would you do island living? I could do island living as well if they had electricity and all that stuff. Yeah. Like it has to be a rich guy's island. Okay. A rich guy's island. Yeah.

Let me see. What is your favorite thing? This is Jason Carpenter. What is your favorite thing a listener has ever sent you in the mail? Beer ranks pretty high up there. Yeah. Beef jerky. Little bit sweets. Yeah. I always like seeing that package. The honeycombs one. Did you have those? Yeah. That was good. I think that's my all-time favorite little bit sweets candy. It's so good. Coffee. You've gotten coffee. Got coffee. Yeah. The beef jerky was really high up there. It's like buds, smoked meats or something since I was a listener out in California. Oh, that lady that printed her photographs on the paper that she made. Oh, that's cool. That was pretty neat. Yeah. We get lots of cool stuff. I don't want to hurt people's feelings. Dan made mugs were pretty

awesome. I still use that. The unicorn tears. I like that. Joe Garden's book. Yeah. That was nice. We get a bunch of cool stuff. It's tough to really separate it out because we've gotten some cool postcards even, right? Yeah. And I want to say my last one, the last one I wrote from Genesee Patrick. I realized I forgot to ask her to tell her that. Tell her a couple more. Yeah. How about one more each? Okay. Classic debate, power to be invisible or fly. I would fly. I don't think I'd want to know what most people have to say about me when I'm not around. Yeah, I would fly too because that means I wouldn't have to fly commercially anymore, which is something I hate passionately. Okay. And that one, by the way, was Shannon McCann. Thanks for that. I'm going to finish up with

Melissa Rosenthal. When you were children, what were your favorite books? That's a good one. I am going to say Generally Anything by Shell Silverstein when I was young, young. Into my little tween years, I got really into Bloom County, the comic. Got all those books. And then my favorite book, though, the first book I ever read, really read, was when I was like 8 or 9, I read The Great Christmas Kidnapping Caper. And it was released in 1978, award-winning children's book about these mice that live in Macy's in New York. That sounds cool. Santa Claus is kidnapped and they have to figure it out and crack the case. Why is everybody always kidnapped in Santa Claus? I don't know, but I have no idea why this hasn't been like a Disney movie. It was

excellent. I read it every year for like 7 to 12. Nice. And it was really good. What's yours? Probably my favorite little kid's book was Hooper Humperdink, not him, which is in that Dr. Seuss camp, but not a Dr. Seuss book, you know what I'm talking about? Sure. I read a lot of Richard Scarry and Berenstain Bears. And then as I got a little older, I read Ramona Quimby books for years. Oh, really? Love those. Never read those. We both did encyclopedia brown too. Yeah. Yeah, he was cool. I'll always remember he knew that that one kid was fake crying and that he was the culprit because the kid put fake tears like on the outside of his eyes, but you always cry from the inside. What a dumb kid. Everyone knows that.

But a lot of the kids he grappled with were pretty stupid. Yeah, that's true. I'd like to read those today and see if I can figure them out. Oh, I'll bet you just be like, I can't read this. You think? Yeah. Well, if you have questions for us, you can always post them on Facebook, facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can also tweet to us at syskpodcast and you can reach us regular snail email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss

you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Boreen. I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting groundbreaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J. Quinta Brunson and so many more new episodes around every Tuesday,

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