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Plan for Amazonian jungle medicines is threatened

Ethnic and political arguments have paralysed an ambitious scheme to make an inventory of indigenous medicinal plants and remedies in Venezuela's Amazon jungle that could be used to develop drugs to fight cancer and AIDS. Preparations for the bioresearch project, involving 50 scientists from the Venezuelan Institute of Scien-tific Investigation and three Venezuelan universities, started with input from Oxford University's Foundation for Ethnobiology in 1991.

The project's director, Dr Fabian Michelangeli, said: “It's impossible to underestimate the potential of this. Venezuela ranks sixth in terms of world biodiversity, with at least 25000 species of plants, of which around 2000 have medicinal uses.” An exciting aspect of the project …