 on the plant and this we use for when people have gallbladder problems. We use this one. I give my knowledge away because I got it from the older people. They gave me their knowledge and I feel that I have to give that knowledge to other people, to young people, so they can spread it. Besides collecting medicinal plants, Dina is on a mission to also preserve them. In the early 1980s, she began Den Paradera, a magnificent botanical garden where she propagates over 300 species. When Dina was unable to find certain types on Curacao, she traveled to the neighboring islands of Bonaire and Aruba where the plants had not yet been eliminated from the landscape. Yes, I started in Paradera because I saw that we were losing a lot of information, a lot of herbs. You could be today here and see a lot of herbs. The next day you would be not finding that anymore. So I started to bring the herbs to this garden to keep the knowledge. The garden is very important to me because I cultivate medicinal herbs so we can know the stories. We can know what kind of herbs we have on this island and also to learn how to use it. It will be a pity that we lose all the informations of the uses of the culture, you know, because people don't know how to use the herbs. The garden is divided in three parts, the botanical part, the historical part and the production. The botanical parts are the herbs divided in sections for the digestion, for the heart, for the respiratory system. You know, when I started, the people thought I was crazy because I had a good job. Why should I go and make my hands dirt with the land? So they thought, you know, but I had a dream that I needed to conserve the culture, to conserve the information and to have the plants. So I went on. Even if people were laughing, it didn't matter. The slaves, when they came here, they brought seeds, you know. Nobody knew that they had the seeds with them. They wanted to survive. They didn't know where they were going, you know. And also, when they were here, they could recognize some of the trees and plants that they had in Africa. There were people who know the medicinal healing, so as the medicinal doctors, you know, the medical, the healing doctors, so they could go to those healing doctors, so they could find help. Here in the Kura Hulanda Museum in nearby Willemstad, actors from the Living History Theater Group portray plantation life and the tragic plight of the captured Africans. Experts estimate that during the 18th and 19th centuries, millions of people were enslaved along Africa's western coast. The Dutch, in need of securing their new colony, used slave ships to cross the 5,000 miles treacherous sea. It was a long, arduous journey to reach the tiny island of Curacao. Yeah, the slaves arrived here on front of the building, and they were unshipped here. You must imagine they were on the ship for six to eight weeks. But most of them... Leo Helms is the director of the Kura Hulanda Museum, which is built on the very site of Curacao's old slave market. And they were very weak and in very bad condition when they arrived here, and then they stayed here on the property for one or two months to get a little bit more stronger. They sent them out to the other mansions on the island to be trained, how to work on the plantations. From here, they were shipped to Cuba and North America. Those that stayed behind in Curacao learned how to adapt to their new life. Many had come from rich West African kingdoms, proud civilizations that had thrived in Mother Africa. Even though the slaves suffered unimaginable hardships, many of their old customs endured. So did their ancient knowledge of medicinal plants. Come on in. Have a seat. The old wisdom of medicinal plant use is still practiced at Den Pardera. This Curacao woman, Sonia, is back for a visit. Like many from the Dutch Antilles, she now lives in the Netherlands. Sonia has experienced severe respiratory problems for the past two years, and modern medicines have failed to cure her. She has turned to Dina for help. Just wait here. I will go get the herbs for you. In her kitchen, Dina prepares several medicines made from medicinal plants to cure Sonia's ailment. They are old recipes passed on to her by island elders. In the beginning, when doctors know that I was working, you know, with the plants, they laughed at me. But sometimes I had doctors here in the garden and they still asking questions. But now they, I mean, I'm accepted on this island. I know people come for advice. I can call a doctor. They know me and I can ask what's the best medicine at this moment are herbs. The best because I believe that we have to work together. With Sonia's treatment complete, Dina leaves Den Paradera for a visit with some of her old friends. First on Dina's list today is to visit Sister Carmen. Sister Carmen came formally to iron my clothes. She was one of the number of healers that Dina chronicled in her book, Green Remedies and Golden Customs of Our Ancestors. So then we started to talk. I noticed that she knew a lot about herbs and that she wanted to conserve the herbs and that in her garden she had some herbs. So when she was ironing, I was asking. So I could sit with her for hours and hours and learn from Sister Carmen. What is this plant? This is Yerba de Ole. When a child has a fever, you can put it on their feet or you can give it to them as a tea. How do they do that? They mash it up and mix it with coconut oil and put it on the feet. They also put it behind the ear. Yes, the herb relieves the problem. Dina also stops by the home of another wise elder by the name of Chacha. Herbs are always good. Like chamomile, it will cleanse the insides. The Sanjura is always good for the stomach. Morning is the best time to drink herbs. This will give you a good appetite. If you have gas in your belly, you drink your mampurrito and you will get rid of the gas. I had a very good time with Chacha because she has been learning from her aunt of her mother, so she she knew a lot about medicinal herbs. There are herbs that used to be easy to find. Now you don't see them anymore. Mampurrito is like that. You don't even see it in the schoolyards. It's all gone. It was important for Dina to document the wise words of these elders for their generation has nearly vanished. Today, few young islanders show much interest in medicinal plants. What we need is people, young people, to learn the herbs from this country. At this moment, you see that plants and medicinal herbs are coming from Colombia, Venezuela and Santo Domingo. A lot of them are sold on the market. I don't feel very well about that because it's it's not the same culture as that of Curacao. You can see on the market, it's dominating the culture of the island. There is more to Curacao than its fanciful harbor front facade that greets incoming cruise ships. This city has the deepest harbor in the West Indies, making it a regional center for maritime commerce. Like many islands throughout the Caribbean, Curacao is modernizing. Most people here enjoy the conveniences of modern drugs, doctors and medical facilities. Because of this, much of the ancient knowledge of medicinal plants is being left behind. But the cultural legacy of healers like Sister Carmen and Chacha is not the only thing that is threatened. The wild places where medicinal plants grow are also under attack from urbanization, industrial expansion and increased development. More people and more growth are beginning to tax the Canucu, Curacao's fragile, arid countryside. Dina makes one more stop before returning home to Denveradera. She heads for one of her favorite spots near the sea. Dina has become increasingly worried as the numbers of wild medicinal plants dwindle each year. She blames the oil refineries in part for upsetting the ecological balance. I'm very concerned. When the oil company came, they pumped a lot of water, so the water got down and people can make wells whenever they want. There are no rules, so we are losing the water that's under the ground. This year it was very, very hot, almost one year no rain, so we are losing very old trees who are more than 200 years old. But Dina Ferris is not alone in her concern for the botanical wonders of Curacao. Here, high on the slopes of Cristofal National Park, biologist John De Freitas searches for plants that hold potential medicinal cures. He works for a local institute called Carmabi, the Caribbean Marine Biological Foundation. They are doing baseline science, attempting to catalog the island's 500-plus plant species. The list has been cut to about 100 that show bacteria fighting properties. Here, we have a number of endemic species. Endemic means that they only occur on only on Curacao or on the leeward islands of the Nalans and Thales that comprises not only Curacao but also Bonaire and Aruba. One such unique species called Eugenia is one of two rare plants that interests De Freitas due to its strong antibacterial tendencies. The name of this plant is Eugenia procera. It's only found in the Caribbean and on Curacao it's mostly found in the Cristofal Park and it's part of the Mitesi family to which also the Eucalyptus tree belongs. John also gathers samples of the Divi Divi tree while on the mountain slope. It has shown a remarkable ability to fight staff infections. There is a story of an old man and he has very good eyesight and he says that's due to the fact that he uses the Divi Divi leaves as an eye wash every morning. That's a very interesting connotation. Divi Divi was active against several microorganisms and also the highest level of activity. So it's very interesting result. As John makes his way off Mount Cristofal his work with Eugenia and the Divi Divi is just beginning. Back at the Carmarbi Institute the samples are dried. For those used in antimicrobial testing ovens are used to speed up the process. For other samples that require examination of essential oils the plants are spread out on a table. This drying process can take up to two weeks and then the tests begin. Yes these are the results of the 10-layer chromatography of the plants we screened for antimicrobial properties. To date Defratus's study has shown some promising results. A number of plants including Eugenia and the Divi Divi have shown strong activity against bacteria. This baseline science could lead other researchers in developing modern medicines based on the power of these ancient roots stems and leaves. In the year 2000 a study by Conservation International declared the Caribbean as one of the world's biodiversity hot spots areas rich with flora and fauna of unique qualities. Curacao in spite of its arid terrain is surprisingly biodiverse but John like Dina Firas is concerned with the island's future. I'm concerned that certain areas that harbor certain plants a unique plant species that doesn't occur anywhere else on the island. It would be petty that those areas would be destroyed for economic development. If you destroy those areas you won't have them back and it will take many decades to create areas similar to those with those characteristics. That's why it's very important for these islands to look ahead and take into account conservation of these areas. But not all of the island's natural medicinal wealth lies on the land. In the early 1990s American researcher Bill Gerwick discovered a blue-green algae called Lingia majuscula or mermaids hair. Bill was able to isolate a chemical compound from the algae that he named curason A in honor of curacao. Early clinical studies showed that it had powerful anti-cancer properties. Today Bill and his wife Lena along with a crew from the Carmabi Institute are getting ready to travel back to where this one-of-a-kind algae was discovered over a decade ago. We made some of our first collections back in December 1991. We found that curacao was very receptive to our coming and exploring their biodiversity for compounds that might be useful to treat human diseases. The particular bay that we've come to focus on is called Spanish water. So what's really unique about the Spanish waters bay is that the blue-green algae growing there it's all it's known as Lingbia majuscula. You can find Lingbia majuscula in other bays nearby but when we looked at the Lingbia majuscula from the other bays they didn't produce the same compounds. They produced other compounds that were quite interesting but they didn't produce curason A. Do you dive a computer? No I don't. This is a shallow dive so and it'll be less than an hour. No scorpions in there. That's always nice to know. Gerwick and researcher Dolphi de Broot from Carmabi donned their diving gear to revisit the rich collection site where the special algae was originally found. It's been several years since Bill collected here and he is anxious to see what's below. This mermaid's hair or Lingbia majuscula as we know it in scientific terms it's really quite a remarkable organism because it's actually a bacterium but a giant bacterium. From the mangrove roots it has one kind of a color it's growing somewhat back underneath the mangroves growing down as trellises. They're kind of fluffy and have a really quite beautiful reddish color oftentimes. The buried treasure here on this island though may not be on land it may be in the sea. It may be some of these algae or creating molecules that will be enormously useful in helping human society. Back on deck Gerwick eagerly pulls out his field microscope and inspects the new collection. These red hairs when we see them in the field but here you can see that they're actually a whole series of little pancakes or coins stacked into these long filaments and they're all encased in that sheath like material. That's really quite a remarkable organism. It's been really nice to see that those algae are still living in that environment and are still quite healthy. So this is the treasure trove of natural products that we've been studying for the last nearly 15 years now. It's absolutely amazing the diversity and biological activity of the compounds that this little seaweed's making. But after the excitement of the moment Bill discovers a disturbing change in Spanish water. As their boat slowly leaves the bay the beginnings of a new coastline development come into view. It's really sad and really hard for me to see because it's going to destroy this habitat. This habitat that is very small and very unique and it's giving given rise to this unique organism. We've not seen this organism anywhere else in the world. It will look just like it does over here. They're going to put in houses and docks and a marina and these kinds of things and it's going to substantially alter this habitat. I would fully expect the organism to disappear. So when I see this kind of development going on and it just really alarms me because what they're doing is they're taking their future this treasure trove of species and chemistry and they're bulldozing it down and we may never unearth this treasure again. The problem is that the shoreline areas are an integral part of your marine ecosystem. Particularly when you're urbanizing areas like this you're going to put in non-native trees that require pesticides to maintain. You're going to be putting in lawns with a great deal of water. They'll require nutrients that is fertilizers and pesticides to maintain them too and as a consequence all that stuff leaches into the bay and destroys the habitat, contaminates it. The current island development plan which was approved in 1997 approves about 90 percent of the shorelines of this bay for urban uses and that will mean that this bay will essentially turn into an urban cesspool with just lying with homes, no scenery, no nature left and a mishmash of boats zooming around and we already are facing human health related water quality problems in parts of the bay during parts of the year. I can take you diving on that side of the bay and we'll see beautiful white bottoms ocean floor but not due to white sand which it should be but due to toilet paper. Not only is the future of mermaids hair in jeopardy but curason a its cancer fighting compound is also facing challenges in the laboratory. Initial tests were promising and showed the substance to be highly toxic to cancerous cells but in later experiments at the national cancer institute in Bethesda, Maryland, curason a was found to have solubility issues and was unstable when tested in mice. These problems were a major setback for the development of the compound into a modern drug and that said to us that the compound was unstable under the conditions of the the body so that has led subsequently now to an effort to refine that structure make it a better molecule and that's what we really should be looking to in nature. We should be looking for new ideas new chemical templates that we're going to take that new chemical structure from the seaweed and we're going to translate it into a molecule that's going to be an efficacious drug. We need to improve its water solubility and its stability in the body and those efforts are taking place right now in various laboratories around the world. One such place is here at the University of Pittsburgh where chemistry professor Peter Whith has taken on the structural challenges of curason a. The molecule was significant and interesting for us because it targeted the part of the biological machinery within the cell that's quite crucial for its growth particularly in cancer cells. Basically cancer cells are very similar to normal cells and that's why it's so difficult to develop effective anti-cancer agents but what we like to do is use the ability of structures such as curason a and the analogs that are developed on this basis to basically to move cancer cells into what's called apoptosis or programmed cell death and cell suicide. But first professor Whith and his students had to tackle the inherent problems of curason a. They overcame the solubility issue making a chemical hybrid structure much like other drug like molecules that dissolve easily in water. They also solve the compounds sensitivity to light. It's a molecular tinker toy set and we are able to build just about anything we'd like to build and that's very satisfying very challenging. You can truly take your visions and test them with the potential goal of course of improving the environment improving human health improving living in general. Even though the new compound based on curason a showed increased biological activity it faced another problem when tested with lab animals. The compound metabolized too quickly due to the animals enzymes not allowing it time enough to attack the tumor. So we now know where the sensitive parts of the molecule are and so we can address the problems in terms of stability towards the biological environment when the compound is actually given to an animal and is in the blood of an animal. But ultimately we hope that then we will have a need a compound that in the mouse will basically make human tumors disappear. But that's just a mouse system so from there on you have to go to a higher animal and reproduce the same findings. To make a modern drug from a natural substance is a long process one full of delays and challenges. Peter Wiff estimates that the development takes two to seven years that's not including the clinical trials that can take up to a decade before the drug is finally released to the public. We really would like to see curason a analogs moving to the clinic and test the hypothesis that we can develop an anti-cancer agent at the molecular level that has the kind of effect that we're predicting stopping cell division and moving cancer cells selectively into cell suicide. We hope we can accomplish that but even if we don't get to the final drug molecule we hope we can learn a lot about the process so maybe with another natural product next time around we'll be able to go all the way. So we have all this information we can follow a single compound very well. What's still a huge challenge and something that makes us very modest again is the fact that very often in the end we cannot explain really what's going on. So we can see that some of these uses of the traditional medicine the folk medicine that they're very valid if you look at the big picture at the overall organisms people do feel better they can get better quite well. Back on Curacao Dina Ferris continues her one woman crusade to save the traditional knowledge of island medicine and the desert's botanical wealth. If the convergence of ancient roots and modern medicine is to continue people like Dina are essential human links in this vital process. The future for medicinal plants in Curacao is the hope that I have the hope that young people can go on with this the hope that my children will learn to be able to spread that my grandchildren would be able to move the herbs from the garden and the earth from the mountain that's the biggest joy I will have. So more information on ancient roots modern medicine log on to www.routesandmedicine.com