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<\/p>\nEvery so often I like to stray outside my comfort zone. You won’t find me jumping out of airplanes, but as a scientist, I do like to keep an open mind about things I know nothing about.<\/p>\n
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\nA hoarse of a different color:<\/strong> Pangdahai to the rescue?<\/p>\n \nMy most recent experiment with the unknown has involved Chinese medicine. I’ve been struggling with periodic laryngitis for weeks now, and with a band gig this past weekend requiring me to be in good voice, I had tried pretty much everything Boots the Chemist had to offer. In fact, a few of my labmates swore they could sense my imminent arrival by the menthol and eucalyptus wafting down the corridors.<\/p>\n \nOne morning our Chinese PhD student (and also a fully trained medic) brought in a small packet containing a handful of strange, furry-brown nut-like objects: Pangdahai<\/em> \u2013 the dried seeds of the Asian tree Sterculia lychnophora<\/em>. A ‘cold’ medicine, he informed me, to counteract the ‘heat’ of inflamed vocal cords.<\/p>\n \nNow, I don’t know much about the proposed explanations behind Chinese medicine, a lot of which sound to my untrained ear more metaphorical than mechanistic. But I do recognize that many of our most important Western drugs, from aspirin to taxol, come from plants, so there is no reason to think that with a few thousand years of experimentation, the Chinese might not have come up with some interesting botanicals themselves. After all, when the Neijing Suwen<\/em> (_The Basic Questions of Internal Medicine_) was purportedly written around 2600 B.C., my ancestors were busy thwacking each others’ heads off with the latest must-have gadget: the bronze sword. <\/p>\n \nAnd then of course there’s that line from the 1987 film The Lost Boys<\/em>: \u201cTell me, Michael, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n \nMy willingness to give Chinese herbal remedies a try was recently boosted by a Nature<\/em> paper<\/a> from Laura Parton and Bradford Lowell at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston which showed that genipin, derived from gardenia fruit and used in Chinese medicine for centuries against Type II diabetes, actually exerts its molecular mechanism by blocking UPC2, a protein that inhibits glucose sensing in the pro-opiomelanocortin neurons of the hypothalamus (doi: 10.1038\/nature06098). Urban myth has it that a Chinese post-doc in the lab persuaded Lowell to let him give genipin a try in their system. <\/p>\n \nSo. Pangdahai. Put the seed in boiling water, and allow it to bloom into a brownish-red gelatinous mass about eight times its previous size. Drink five changes of water, the second being the most potent. Not without some degree of trepidation, I might add. The result? It made my face tingle, and it felt pretty nice on my throat. <\/p>\n \nI’m not, however, entirely convinced it felt any nicer than hot water alone. Now where did that ‘control me’ get to?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every so often I like to stray outside my comfort zone. You won’t find me jumping out of airplanes, but as a scientist, I do like to keep an open mind about things I know nothing about. A hoarse of … Continue reading