But finding the right gene or chemical sequence can be like looking for a needle in an Everest-sized haystack. One shortcut researchers rely on, increasingly, is the knowledge of tribal shamans and medicine men. No longer do scientists simply dismiss witchdoctors' bat-wing remedies. Potions that call for toadstools plucked from a graveyard or the blood of a black rooster may indeed have some scientific basis beyond superstition. Scientists who are cataloguing rain-forest plants have noted that climate, soil and location all influence the type of tissues and enzymes produced by the flora.

Like the Onge's bitter brew, these native concoctions can provide the first breakthrough in the long process toward developing a drug. Borrowing or "stealing" a tribe's lore of indigenous plants and animals can help a pharmaceutical company save years of hit-and-miss testing and millions of dollars in research. "In India we have over 5,000 tribes," says P.S. Ramakrishnan, an ecology professor at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. "It's impossible to find a plant species that isn't being used by one tribe or another."

In India alone, according to eco-activist Vandana Shiva, the medicinal properties of at least 22 plants, which had been used traditionally to cure diseases ranging from high blood pressure to rheumatic fever, have been patented internationally by scientists and drug companies from India and abroad. Profits can be enormous. A Frenchman patented an extract made from the bark of an African Pygeum tree, which native healers had used as a cure for "old men's disease"--enlargement of the prostate, an ailment common among elderly males. Throughout Africa, hundreds of tons of bark are being harvested, much of it illegally, and the tree may be on the verge of extinction. Sales of products derived from Pygeum bark amount to more than $220 million a year.

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