Pathway 01 — ethnobotany
Ethnobotany and Neurodegenerative Diseases
How does what a community eats shape who survives? Paul Cox traces the ethnobotanical detective work that linked cyanobacteria, BMAA, and traditional diet to ALS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s — and to an amino acid now in FDA clinical trials.
● 5 modules
● 15 lessons
● 26 minutes
● All levels
Paul Cox, PhD
Ethnobotanist
course overview
“This course follows a real investigation — from a dying village in Guam to a longevity village in Okinawa, from primate trials in St. Kitts to FDA-approved clinical trials for ALS and Alzheimer’s. It is a demonstration of what ethnobotany can actually do when it is applied with rigour to one of medicine’s hardest problems.”
what you will learn
Understand why sessile organisms — plants, marine invertebrates, cyanobacteria — are the primary source of bioactive pharmaceutical compounds
Trace the ethnobotanical pipeline from folk healer observation to clinical drug development, using digitalis, reserpine, and prostratin as case studies
Evaluate the BMAA hypothesis: how a cyanobacterial neurotoxin in the traditional Chamorro diet was linked to an unusually high rate of ALS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s in Guam
Assess the evidence connecting Gulf War syndrome to cyanobacterial dust inhalation in the Kuwaiti desert
Understand how L-serine blocks BMAA misincorporation into proteins and what the clinical trial data show for ALS and Alzheimer’s disease
Compare random, ecological, phylogenetic, genetic, and ethnobotanical screening strategies and evaluate their respective hit rates and tradeoffs
course sYllabus
free preview — Module 1 · Lesson 1
watch free
Introduction to Biodiversity
Paul Cox opens by establishing the molecular case for biodiversity: of 11,500 known chemical families, 40 percent exist only in natural products and cannot be synthesised. With roughly half of all pharmaceuticals tracing their origins to living organisms — and 85 percent of the world’s people still depending on plants for medicine — Cox frames the stakes of what ethnobotany stands to find.
aprox: 2 minutes
about the instructor
Paul Cox, PhD
Ethnobotanist
Paul Cox is an ethnobotanist whose field investigations in Samoa, Guam, Okinawa, and the Gulf States have led from traditional healer knowledge to active FDA clinical trials. His work discovering Prostratin — a broadly antiviral compound from a Samoan medicinal plant — became an early model for ethical benefit-sharing with indigenous communities and helped shape what is now the Nagoya Protocol. His investigation of neurodegenerative disease among the Chamorro people of Guam linked the neurotoxin BMAA, produced by cyanobacteria in cycad roots and bioaccumulated in flying foxes, to some of the highest recorded rates of ALS, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease. That detective work led directly to L-serine clinical trials now underway at Dartmouth, Houston Methodist, and beyond.
Ethnobotany
Neurodegenerative disease
BMAA research
Indigenous intellectual property
Clinical ethnopharmacology
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