Code Swaraj
longevity but also their fertility, a result superior to that of red wine and of the control group.
An even more impressive experiment was described to me by Dr. Ramaswamy, a prominent neurologist who is Co-Chairman of the TDU Board of Trustees. One of the problems with doing research in medicine is how to test the results in the so-called real world. One can, of course, run experiments on lab rats or fruit flies, but they are different from humans. Testing theory on humans is particularly difficult as one can do great harm and there are stringent laboratory protocols on field tests. This is a difficult problem for all medical research.
The doctor said there were medicines that were supposed to help cure malaria that they wished to test the effectiveness of. However, the only way to do so would be to take a biopsy of a liver that had been injected with the medicine, and that is of course not possible on a live human who suffers from malaria!
What the team did was to use cutting edge stem cell technology, starting with skin cells from an arm. With stem cells, one can grow any organ of the human body, so they grew livers. They injected the livers with malaria, then injected one with the Ayurvedic medicine, and were able to measure the effectiveness of the ancient drug.
The visit was fascinating, and of course my thoughts turned to this trove of traditional knowledge. Darshan Shankar said they had an extensive database they had put together of medicines from the classic texts, together with photographs, annotations, and other materials. I asked if that database could possibly be put online? He said the Biodiversity Act would prohibit that. I did not understand and wanted to know more.
That evening, Her Royal Excellency Pramoda Devi Wadiyar, the Maharani of Mysore, hosted an event for a few dozen noted members of Bengaluru society and the doctors of TDU at the Bangalore Palace. After the presentations, we adjourned for a spectacular dinner of South Indian food, including dosas and pani puri, and for desert a watermelon kulfi served in a watermelon rind and an orange kulfi served in a hollowed-out orange. At dinner, I kept asking questions about Ayurvedic knowledge on the Internet and the implications of the biodiversity act on disseminating that information.
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