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ABSTRACT
In 1949 scientists in the United States announced the dramatic effects of a new drug, cortisone. They found that cortisone could be made cheaply from diosgenin, extracted from Mexican wild yam species, and began a global search for supplementary plants. By the early 1950s, South African botanists had identified the yam Dioscorea sylvatica, elephant’s foot, as promising. Boots, a major British pharmaceutical company, was keen to develop a source of diosgenin to manufacture corticosteroid medicines and started a factory in Johannesburg in 1955 to process D. sylvatica. Systematic extraction began in the eastern Transvaal and Natal. Our article focuses first on the global pharmaceutical context, as well as the identification and extraction of this plant. Second, we examine the conflicts that developed around harvesting, especially in Natal. Natal Parks Boards officers were uneasy about mass exploitation of a wild plant and attempted to enforce strict conditions. By 1960, they succeeded in terminating permits and Boots ceased production of South African diosgenin. This was a significant case for a fledgling provincial conservation authority. Third, we explore briefly issues of bioprospecting: the scientific exploitation of plant properties and whether this was a case of direct appropriation of local or indigenous knowledge.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Wellcome Trust for a Research Bursary (ref: 210373/Z/18/Z) supporting archival work, and Anna Greenwood, University of Nottingham, for supporting Nottingham workshops.
Notes on the contributors
William Beinart is emeritus professor at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His recent publications include Prickly Pear: The Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape (Wits University Press, 2011, with Luvuyo Wotshela); African Local Knowledge (Wits University Press, 2013, with Karen Brown); Searching for Rights and Freedoms in the Twentieth Century (Pearson, A-level textbook, 2015 with Edward Teversham) and Rights to Land (Jacana, 2017, with Peter Delius and Michelle Hay).
Rebecca Beinart is an artist, educator and curator based in Nottingham, UK. An ongoing engagement with community, ecology, knowledge-making and the politics of public space runs through her practice. Since 2017 she has been developing the Urban Antibodies project, tracing the development of pharmaceutical drugs based on plants, supported by Arts Council England and Wellcome Trust. She works as the Engagement Curator at Primary (www.weareprimary.org/), an artist-led space in Nottingham, running a public programme of commissions, workshops and events.
Notes
1 This advertisement was found by Hilary Ingram in The Chemist and Druggist, issue 3986, 14 July 1956 (Wellcome Library), and sent to Boots archivist Sophie Clapp. R. Beinart, ‘Unearthing: Experiments with Plants that Teach Us History: Breadfruit and Cinchona Bark (Quinine)’, workshop at National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, 21 and 28 May 2017.
2 R. Beinart, ‘From Plants to Pills: Elephant’s Foot to Cortisone’, presentation and workshop at Primary, Nottingham, June 2018; ‘Yams, Hormones & Bioprospecting’, Wellcome Collection Reading Room, March 2019. Thanks to the Wellcome Trust for a Research Bursary (ref: 210373/Z/18/Z) supporting archival work, and Anna Greenwood, University of Nottingham, for supporting Nottingham workshops.
3 W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock and the Environment 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
4 L. Van Sittert, ‘Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The Discovery and Defence of Indigenous Flora at the Cape ca. 1890–1939’, Landscape Research, 28, 1 (2003), 113–129; S. Pooley, ‘Pressed Flowers: Ideas about Alien and Indigenous Plants at the Cape, c.1902–45’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 3 (2010), 599–618.
5 L. Schiebinger Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
6 M. Hokkanen, ‘Imperial Networks, Colonial Bioprospecting and Burroughs Wellcome & Co.: The Case of Strophanthus Kombe from Malawi (1859–1915)’, Social History of Medicine, 25 (2012), 589–607.
7 Ibid.
8 C. Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); A.D. Osseo-Assare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).
9 A. Pollock, ‘Places of Pharmaceutical Knowledge-making: Global Health, Postcolonial Science, and Hope in South African Drug Discovery’, Social Studies of Science, 44 (2014), 848–873; W. Beinart and K. Brown, African Local Knowledge and Livestock Health: Diseases and Treatments in South Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2013).
10 L.A. Foster, Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants and Patents in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press: 2018).
11 Thanks to Thuso Mohlala in Acornhoek and Andile Magengelele in Johannesburg for assistance and translation.
12 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1950, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1950/summary/, accessed 1 August 2019.
13 L.V. Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
14 G. Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
15 S. Correll, B.G. Schubert, H.S. Gentry and W.O. Hawley, ‘The Search for Plant Precursors of Cortisone’, Economic Botany, 9, 4 (1955), 307–375.
16 Ibid., 316–318.
17 South African Pharmaceutical Journal, January 1952, 41; V. Quirke, ‘Making British Cortisone: Glaxo and the Development of Corticosteroids in Britain in the 1950s–1960s’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36 (2005), 645–674.
18 D. Cantor, ‘Cortisone and the Politics of Empire: Imperialism and British Medicine, 1918–1955’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine; 67, 3 (1993), 478.
19 Cantor, ‘Cortisone and the Politics of Empire’.
20 Quirke, ‘Making British Cortisone’.
21 Ibid., 661–662.
22 J.A. Hogg, ‘Steroids, the Steroid Community, and Upjohn in Perspective: A Profile of Innovation’, Steroids 57 (1992), 593–616.
23 Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive, Nottingham (WBA), file BT/5/39/1/1/15, Supervisors Newsletter no 15; for information on the archive, A. Greenwood and H. Ingram, ‘Sources and Resources “The People’s Chemists”: The Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive’, Social History of Medicine, 31, 4 (2018), 857–869.
24 W.J. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, vol. II (London: Longman, 1824), 147.
25 I.H. Burkill, ‘Testudinaria as a Section of the Genus Dioscorea’, South African Journal of Botany, 18 (1952), 177–191, 190.
26 J.M. Watt and M.G. Breyer Brandwijk, The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Southern Africa (Edinburgh: R. and S. Livingstone, 1932), 30.
27 Thanks to Thuso Mohlala for assistance and translation.
28 L.E. Codd, ‘Drugs from Wild Yams’, African Wildlife, 14, 3 (1960), 215–227; SANBI Library, Botanical Gardens, Pretoria, Dr L.E.W. Codd, personal file. Thanks to Anne-Lise Fourie for assistance at SANBI.
29 We enquired at the National Archives, Pretoria, SANBI, the Department of Agriculture library, and the Agricultural Research Council but none seemed to know about these archives. It is possible that they have been discarded, or that they are in a storeroom, either in one of these institutions, or in the intermediate depot of the National Archives. From the late 1940s the Transvaal province established a Department of Nature Conservation. Its officers were also involved with Dioscorea but these records also seem to have disappeared.
30 SANBI National Herbarium, National Botanical Gardens, Pretoria, file 1255 Dioscorea L. Mpumalanga 16. D sylvatica Eck ? sp lydenburgensis [sic].
31 Ibid.
32 Burkill, ‘Testudinaria’.
33 Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, archives, Burkill papers, Box Bur 2/1/6, Notes on African Dioscoreaceae; Bur 2/1/1 Notes on dioscoreaceae.
34 I.H. Burkill, ‘The Organography and the Evolution of Dioscoreaceae, the Family of Yams’, Journal of the Linnaean Society, 56, 367 (1960), 319–412.
35 Cape Archives, Provincial Administrator (CA, PAF), file NC/A2, Gathering and Exportation of Elephants Foot 1952–1957, H. Foulds and Company to Curator, Flora and Fauna Division, Provincial Administration, 24 June 1952 and subsequent correspondence.
36 Ibid.
37 SANBI National Herbarium, 1252 Dioscorea L. file – Southern Africa, N. Cape, W. Cape, elephantipes. The chemist was probably Prof Henry Stephen, a British chemist who worked at Wits till 1954; Codd, ‘Drugs from Wild Yams’.
38 D. Hey, A Nature Conservationist Looks Back (Cape Town: Cape Nature Conservation, 1995), 76.
39 CA, PAF, NC/A2, Chief Division of Botany, Department of Agriculture to Provincial Secretary, 6 August 1952
40 CA, PAF, NC/A2, Chairman Advisory Committee for Nature Conservation to Inland Fisheries, Provincial Administration, 28 August 1952. The Department of Nature Conservation grew partly out of the Inland Fisheries administration where Hey had worked.
41 CA, PAF, NC/A2, 20 August 1952.
42 SANBI National Herbarium 1252 Dioscorea L. file – Literature and Illustrations: Michael A.Viljoen, ‘The Distribution of Dioscorea (Testudinaria) Elephantipes – a preliminary survey’, typescript 24 November 1952.
43 Ibid.
44 CA, PAF, NC/A2, L. S. Dyson, to Acting Provincial Secretary, 6 January 1953.
45 CA, PAF, NC/A2, Director Nature Conservtion to Provincial Secretary, 13 January 1953 and following correspondence.
46 Ibid.
47 CA, PAF, NC/A2, Hey to Provincial Secretary, 17 February 1953.
48 Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal (EKZN) archive, file AA 33/2/1, Flora Dioscorea Sylvatica, July 1956-March 1961. This is the archive of the former Natal Parks Board, kept in a basement room in their building in Pietermaritzburg. Thanks to Vanessa de Vos for assistance. We could not find the parallel archive for the Transvaal. Information on the Transvaal is in Director of Nature Conservation, Transvaal to Director of Natal Parks Board, 16 August 1957 with enclosure: Investigation into Dioscorea 2 April 1957.
49 WBA, unnumbered file, Boots in India, typescript summary.
50 Copies of the journal are held by the Pharmaceutical Museum, Johannesburg; thanks to Ray Pogir for assistance.
51 South African Pharmaceutical Journal, July 1952.
52 Ibid., January 1952, February 1952, 41.
53 Ibid., March 1952, 44, full page advert for Cortone.
54 Ibid., May 1952; Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, Hormones. A Survey of Their Properties and Uses (London: Pharmaceutical Press, 1951).
55 WBA/BT/2/30/6 covers the establishment of Biochemico, early developments at the factory and annual reports.
56 P.B. Simons, Ice Cold in Africa: The History of the Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Company Limited (Cape Town: Fernwood Press, 2000).
57 South African Pharmaceutical Journal, February 1955, 31.
58 Ibid., July 1955.
59 WBA/BT/2/30/6, F. Wayne to Fox, 22 June 1955.
60 WBA/BT/8/55/1/1 Research Department ‘Open Week’ booklet, 19–23 October 1959.
61 WBA/BT/8/17/1/1, Report of visit to Biochemico Ltd (SA), 1955.
62 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, ‘Memorandum to the Natal Provincial Administration: the collection of Dioscorea sylvatica (Elephant’s foot) prepared by Biochemico’ for meeting between Biochemico and the Natal Provincial Executive Committee, 30 November 1956. Codd, ‘Drugs from Wild Yams’, 225 records figures of 913 tons for 1955–1956. It is likely that this figure does not include earlier extraction, and the official figures probably did not record all extraction.
63 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, report from S.S. du Plessis to provincial Director of Nature Conservation, Transvaal, March 1957, enclosed in letter 25 June 1957.
64 EKZN, AA 33/2/1. ‘Memorandum to the Natal Provincial Administration’.
65 WBA/BT/12/10/36/1, J.M. Scott to G.L. Hobday, 18 July 1961.
66 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, report from S.S. du Plessis.
67 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, unsigned report 2 April 1957, enclosed in letter received by Director of Nature Conservation, Transvaal, 25 June 1957.
68 Codd, ‘Drugs from Wild Yams’, 225.
69 EKZN, AA/33/5/2, Flora collection permits for protected plants miscellaneous, starting in 1949.
70 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Provincial Secretary to Secretary NPB, 11 July1956.
71 Terry Oatley and John Vincent, ‘Obituary: Colonel Jack Vincent OBE, 1904–1999’, Ostrich, Journal of African Ornithology, 71 (2000), 442–443.
72 EKZN, AA/33/5/2 Flora collection permits.
73 K.D. Gordon-Gray, ‘A Man of Natal: Adolf’ Joseph Wilhelm Bayer 1900–1978’, Natalia, 9 (1979), 36–38.
74 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Director of Wildlife Conservation to Provincial Secretary, 25 September 1956.
75 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Provincial Secretary to Biochemico, 24 October 1956.
76 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Handwritten note of meeting between Provincial Secretary and Biochemico, 7 November 1956.
77 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Bayer to Secretary NPB, 22 October 1956.
78 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Bayer to Provincial Secretary, 12 November 1956.
79 EKZN, AA 33/2/1. ‘Memorandum to the Natal Provincial Administration: the collection of Dioscorea sylvatica (Elephant’s foot)’, prepared by Biochemico for meeting between Howie and Cockfield and the Natal Provincial Executive Committee, 30 November 1956. No author given but probably prepared by Dr H. Buchner, who worked for Biochemico; he was attributed author of a similar memo in 1960.
80 Ibid.
81 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Secretary NPB to Provincial Secretary, 18 January 1957.
82 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Minutes of Natal Parks Board meeting, 3 May 1957.
83 EKZN library, pamphlets and offprints boxes, 1957 and 1958, C.J. Ward, Ecologist’s reports.
84 I. Player, The White Rhino Saga (London: Collins, 1972).
85 EKZN, AA/33/2/3 Dioscorea Sylvatica – Ecologist’s reports C J. Ward, 1957–58, ‘Report on the Preliminary Investigation into the Exploitation of the Tubers of Dioscorea Sylvatica, a Protected Indigenous Plant’, 11 August 1957.
86 Ibid.
87 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, Fourth report
88 Ibid.
89 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, C.J. Ward, Fifth report, July 1958.
90 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, ‘Second Interim report on the Exploitation of the Tubers of Dioscorea sylvatica, a protected plant’, 3 December 1957.
91 Ibid.
92 Of the four D. sylvatica plants that we saw in Lydenburg, all were irregularly shaped and partly under rocks. It would have been difficult to measure them. Thanks to J. Burrows, Buffelskloof, and Lazarus Seerame, Sterkspruit Nature Reserve, for showing us these.
93 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, ‘Third Interim report on the Exploitation of the Tubers of Dioscorea sylvatica, a protected plant’, 3 February 1958.
94 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, Second Interim report.
95 EKZN, AA/33/2/1, Bayer’s report is enclosed in Provincial Secretary to Director NPB, 15 April 1958.
96 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, C.J. Ward, ‘Report on the Preliminary Investigation into the Exploitation of the Tubers of Dioscorea Sylvatica, a Protected Indigenous Plant’, 11 August 1957.
97 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, record of monthly returns from Biochemico, undated list.
98 EKZN, AA/33/5/2, Vincent to Bayer, 23 May 1958.
99 Although his correspondence suggests he was deeply engaged at the time, wild yams may not have been a major concern for Vincent, compared to wildlife conservation, as he did not mention this episode at all in his autobiography: J. Vincent, Web of Experience, an Autobiography (Mooi River: privately published, 1989).
100 EKZN, AA/33/2/3, ‘Seventh Interim Report on the Exploitation of the Tubers of Dioscorea sylvatica’, February 1959.
101 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Vincent to Mitchell, 18 February 1959.
102 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Bayer to Vincent 9 November 1959.
103 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Bayer to Provincial Secretary, 9 November 1959.
104 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Provincial Secretary to Biochemico, 14 December 1959.
105 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Biochemico to Provincial Secretary, 22 December 1959.
106 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Record of monthly returns from Biochemico, undated list.
107 WBA/BT/8/55/1/1, article ‘Cortisone from Diosgenin’, The Industrial Chemist, April 1956.
108 Ibid.
109 WBA/BT/11/38/3/1, Article on ‘Elephant’s Foot’, The Hexagon, No. 3, 1959.
110 WBA/BT/2/30/6, this file includes some accounts and reports of Annual General Meetings.
111 SANBI, National Herbarium, recorded from notes on the specimens in D. sylvatica files.
112 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Provincial Secretary to Secretary Parks Board, 25 January 1958.
113 EKZN, AA 33/2/1, Director of Wildlife Conservation to Provincial Secretary, 10 February 1958.
114 Codd, ‘Drugs from Wild Yams’.
115 WBA/ BT/12/10/36/1, Wilson to Scott, October 1961.
116 WBA/ BT/12/10/36/1, Wilson to P. de Beer, 28 April 1961
117 Codd, ‘Drugs from Wild Yams’, 225.
118 WBA/ BT/12/10/36/1, Wilson to P. de Beer, Lydenburg, 28 April 1961.
119 WBA/ BT/12/10/36/1, Hobday to Scott, 17 April 1961.
120 Discussion with Dr Liz Peretz, Oxford, 15 February 2019; some of his letters home survive.
121 WBA/ BT/12/10/36/1, Scott to Peretz, 25 September 1961.
122 WBA/ BT/12/10/36/1, Peretz to Scott, 28 September 1961.
123 Thanks to Paul Wilkin at Kew Gardens for showing Rebecca this plant.
124 The term is used in Christopher Morris, ‘Biopolitics and Boundary Work in South Africa’s Sutherlandia Clinical Trial’, Medical Anthropology, 36, 7 (2017), 685–698.
125 W. Beinart, ‘Men, Science, Travel and Nature in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Cape’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 24, 4 (1998), 775–799; K. Flint, ‘Compounding Traditions: from “Untraditional Healers” to Modern Bioprospectors of South Africa’s Medicinal Plants’, in S. Sheikh and U. Orlow, eds, Theatrum Botanicum (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018).
126 Quirke, ‘Making British Cortisone’, 647.
127 V.L. Williams, D. Raimondo, N.R. Crouch, A.B. Cunningham, C.R. Scott-Shaw, M. Lötter and A.M. Ngwenya, ‘Forest Elephant’s Foot: Dioscorea sylvatica Eckl’, SANBI Red List of South African Plants http://redlist.sanbi.org/species.php?species=1777-4002, accessed 1 August 2019.
128 V.L. Williams, K. Balkwill and E.T.F. Witkowski, ‘Unraveling the Commercial Market for Medicinal Plants and Plant Parts on the Witwatersrand, South Africa’, Economic Botany, 54, 3 (2000), 310–327.
129 V.L. Williams, J.E. Victor and N.R. Crouch, ‘Red Listed Medicinal Plants of South Africa: Status, Trends, and Assessment Challenges’, South African Journal of Botany, 86, (2013), 23–35.
130 Thanks to Andile Magengelele for assistance and translation.
131 The SANBI website article, which refers to Codd’s 1960 article, describes this episode briefly.