Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

It started with turmeric. An essential ingredient of most Indian curries, the spice was paid tribute by Marco Polo; he compared it favorably to saffron, and noted its importance in traditional medicines. Indeed, Indian doctors have long reached for the knobby yellow root to treat a variety of ailments from skin disease to stomachache and infection. So when two U.S.-based researchers were awarded a patent in 1995 on turmeric's special wound-healing properties, a collective howl of outrage arose from the subcontinent. "Housewives have been using turmeric for centuries," says V.K. Gupta, director of India's National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources in New Delhi. "It's outrageous that someone would try and patent it." The patent was eventually revoked, after a decade-long battle in which the Indian government and private sector spent millions of dollars in legal and research fees to prove that turmeric's qualities were well documented in ancient medical textbooks. Gupta scrolls through a list of some 5,000 applications currently pending approval by U.S. and European patent offices, jabbing a finger at the most egregious examples of what he considers to be outright theft. He estimates that at least half of those scientific "discoveries" are established remedies in India's ancient plant-based medical system, called Ayurveda. To Gupta, each application is a jewel plundered from India's vast trove of medicinal knowledge. "If this isn't piracy, I don't know what is," he says.

India's traditional medicine is under attack. Not just from medical marauders taking a shortcut to the next blockbuster drug by using ancient remedies, but from modernity itself. A new generation of Indians has turned from Ayurveda to Western drugs that are cheaper and work faster. Many of the foraged plants, like bitter snake gourd—good for treating digestive disorders—are disappearing along with forest habitats. Meanwhile, Western countries have embraced Ayurveda as an alternative to conventional medicines, placing additional strains on already dwindling supplies of rare plants. Treating what ails the 3,000-year-old medical system requires a radical prescription: a massive dose of modern technology. "Ayurveda is the accumulation of thousands of generations' worth of knowledge," says Gupta. "But we have to modernize in order to mine it."

Traditional remedies have long been a rich resource for pharmaceutical companies. Quinine, a treatment for malaria, comes from the bark of the cinchona tree and was an ancient Peruvian cure. But Ayurveda is different: most of its medicines are based on multiple herbs that work in concert. Ayurvedic doctors didn't just prescribe herbal cures; they documented the individual properties of each ingredient as well as how it worked in conjunction with others. Upstairs from Gupta's office, around 30 Ayurvedic doctors are poring over a collection of these medical texts written in Sanskrit, some of them more than 1,000 years old. The texts are divided into verses, each of which refers to a disease and its treatment. The doctors categorize the verses by diagnosis, treatment and plant source. The information, along with a photographic scan of the relative verse, is then uploaded to an online database and translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Hindi. So far, some 140,000 treatments have been entered into the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a $2 million project launched five years ago to provide a direct link to what is regarded in the patent world as prior knowledge. The first of its kind, the TKDL is serving as a model for countries such as Brazil and China, which also want to safeguard traditional healing systems. Once recorded, patents on existing remedies cannot be awarded.

It isn't just pharmaceutical companies who are interested in Ayurveda. At upscale resorts, Western tourists spend hundreds of dollars on Ayurvedic rheumatism or detoxification treatments. Partly because of its cachet in the West, partly because of better packaging—capsules instead of bitter syrups, pills instead of difficult-to-swallow pastes and powders—Ayurveda is gaining popularity among younger Indians, too. It's a development that Indira Balachandran, author of a multivolume compendium of India's Ayurvedic plants, welcomes, but also fears. Unlike conventional medicines, which are based on manufactured ingredients, Ayurveda uses whole plants—usually dozens of them—for each remedy. "The demand for medicinal plants is at an all-time high," says Balachandran, "but it is accompanied by unprecedented deforestation and unsustainable harvesting. Our medical-resource base is shrinking before our eyes."

To rescue India's Ayurvedic plants from their own popularity, Balachandran, with the backing of Arya Vaidya Sala Kottakkal (AVSK), one of India's foremost Ayurveda facilities, has established the Centre for Medicinal Plants Research in the lushly forested hills of Kerala in southern India. Part garden and part institute, the center buzzes with the activity of dozens of scientists, chemists and botanists, all intent on preserving India's herbal heritage before it is harvested out of existence. In one building, A. Sarala, a technician dressed in white coat, surgical mask and cap, bends over a beaker of tiny green sprouts rooted in agar agar. Using long tweezers, she carefully places one of the sprouts into a test tube marked with the Latin and Sanskrit words for bitter snake gourd. The herb, used in over 75 Ayurvedic preparations, is notoriously difficult to cultivate. One of the goals of the center is to figure out how to grow such plants in a garden setting. By experimenting with nutritional sources, lighting and soil pH, scientists at the center hope to standardize cultivation methods to ensure the survival of such rare herbs. "We are doing this for posterity," says Balachandran.

T.S. Muraleedharan, AVSK's chief of research and development, has more immediate plans. "No doctors outside of the tradition will prescribe our medicines," he says. "My goal is to make them globally recognized." In India, it is enough that a remedy be described in one of the 54 ancient Ayurvedic texts for it to be allowed on the market, under the theory that hundreds of years of use support its efficacy and non-toxicity. But that kind of record is not enough for conventional medical practitioners, who require exhaustive clinical trials before a new medicine will be accepted by government regulators. "We know Ayurveda works," says Muraleedharan. "Now we just have to figure out how it works."

Muraleedharan's R&D facility, on the top floor of AVSK's 100-year-old factory, resembles a high-school science lab. Scales, beakers and Bunsen burners litter the marble-topped counters. A young man in a white coat stares intently into the bowl of an industrial kitchen mixer as it churns through a new formula for treating skin discoloration. But in an air-conditioned corner of the lab, isolated by a glass partition, hums a massive machine that would never be found on a high-school campus. It's an Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer, used to detect the presence of heavy metals. Next to it sits a High Performance Thin Layer Chromatograph, a computer that reads chemical fingerprints. Muraleedharan uses these machines to identify the active ingredients of traditional remedies. Once a medicine's formulation is broken down into essential components, Muraleedharan can build something new using the traditional building blocks. In this way, he hopes to revolutionize India's ancient traditions—and maybe create a blockbuster drug in the process. He is already excited about one promising new discovery, a treatment for peptic ulcers, and says it's ready for clinical trials. "We are on the cusp of something big," he says. "Maybe in five years we will look back and see this as the beginning of the new Ayurveda." And the start of a whole new range of modern medicines.