Note on Code Swaraj
Traditional Knowledge and Biopirates
Traditional knowledge was a new area for me, one in which I had not read widely. For my October 2017 trip, Sam flew in from Chicago and I flew in from San Francisco, and we met in the Delhi airport and went straight to Bengaluru. Our first stop was an Ayurvedic university and hospital where Sam is the Chancellor, an organization he helped found 30 years ago with his friend Darshan Shankar.
Ayurveda is the traditional science of medicine in Indian Sanskrit texts as passed down and refined through the ages, and the practitioners are known as vaidyas. Related to Ayureda is Unani, the ancient medical tradition brought in from the Arab and Persian world and practiced by the Muslim hakims.
While Sam attended to his duties with his board and professors, I walked the grounds. The grounds of Trans Disciplinary University (TDU) are a fascinating place. There are over 6,500 medicinal plants used in India and documented in the ancient texts, and the grounds of TDU has over 1,640 species growing. In an extensive herbarium, over 4,500 species had been preserved and collected.
TDU combines an extensive knowledge of the classic texts and methods with the very latest in modern science. Over 50 Ph.D. students do cutting edge research to try to understand how and why the classic techniques of Ayurveda work (or don’t work). The school has recently expanded to include undergraduate education and runs a very large hospital. In addition, TDU maintains a computerized database of 6,500 medicinal plants, formulations, pharmacology, pharmaceutical principles and methods, therapeutics, pathogenesis, bioregulation and other aspects of Ayurvedic science.
I saw several examples of this research. For example, there are studies that indicate that some foods may increase the longevity of life. Some popular studies have shown this with red wine. In Ayurveda, pomegranate is reputed to have the same properties, part of the branch of Ayurveda called Rasayana, the science of longevity.
A Ph.D. student used drosophila (fruit flies) to test that proposition. Some fruit flies were given red wine, others given pomegranate juice, others were a control group. By measuring how far up a container the fruit flies were able to climb, and for how long, there was a measure of vitality and strength. The student found that a supplementation of the fruit fly diet increased not only their
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