Brazilian rain forest

There are several books on the history of the development of taxol, which is one of the most remarkable stories in product development. In fact, it inspired the 1992 motion picture Medicine Man, starring Sean Connery as a research botanist looking for a cancer cure in the Brazilian rain forest. For a time, it became a moral drama pitting the needs of patients of intractable ovarian and breast cancer against the passions of environmentalists to preserve an obscure Pacific yew tree. Suffness and Wall are two of the principals in this story, and they wrote (1995) It [Taxol] is not an obvious winner till the very end, and there were a number of times till the very end when it seemed highly likely that it would not be put into development at all, or that once it had been accepted, it would be dropped. More than 30 years passed between the discovery of taxol, with its potential as an anticancer drug, and its approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use. 

Grace, J., Malhi, Y., Lloyd, J., McIntyre, L, Miranda, A. C., Meir, P, and Miranda, II. S. (1996). The it.se of eddy-covariance to infer the net carbon-dioxide uptake of Brazilian rain forest. Global Change Biol. 2, 209-218. 

Certain crops require a special climate and soil. Plants native to the American tropical rain forest give coca (Erythroxylum cocoa), avocado (Persea americana), the American counterpart of the mango (Spondias mombin), guava (Psidium guqjava), papaya (Carica papaya), the Brazilian nut (Bertholletia excelsa), and chewing-gum (latex om Achras sapota). 

Fearnside, P, M. 1990. Predominant land uses in Brazilian Amazonia. In Alternatives to Deforestation Steps Towards Sustainable Use of the Amazon Rain Forest, ed. A. B. Anderson (Columbia University Press, New York), pp. 233-251. 

Lastly it should be mentioned that the Cerrado stands alone among the major Brazilian biomes in not being recognized in the constitution as a national heritage, a status accorded to the Amazon, Atlantic Rain Forest, Pantanal and coastal areas. Efforts are now being made to amend the constitution to afford the cerrado such recognition. If successful they should at long last remove the biome s poor relative status and allow it to compete on equal terms for conservational resources. 

Fig. 1.1). The tribes involved are mostly hunter-gatherers in the tropical rain-forest area some marginal tribes such as the Guaharibo on the Upper Orinoco and the Nambikwara and Paresi on the central Brazilian plateau are also included. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 record the species of Loganiaceae and Menispermaceae that have been documented, usually by means of herbarium specimens, as components of curare the localities where used and some of the tribes that are known to have employed the plants are also indicated. 

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