Drowning in the Magic Well: Shaman Pharmaceuticals and the Elusive Value of Traditional Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biodiversity prospecting, and ethnobotanical search methods that draw on the medicinal knowledge of traditional societies, are mechanisms of drug discovery with the potential to reward the conservers of biological resources. Shaman Pharmaceuticals aspired to be a model of ethnobotanical bioprospecting, discovering new medicines while sharing benefits with indigenous people. Shaman's failure to market any new pharmaceutical products and its ultimate bankruptcy were heralded as marking the failure, and future abandonment, of ethnobotanical bioprospecting. This analysis of Shaman's history suggests that risks inherent in drug development, company risk associated with Shaman's drug development strategy, and technological change in the industry all contributed to its failure. The authors examine the opportunities and constraints encountered in bioprospecting and ethnobotanical searches and argue that natural products will remain important to drug development. Technological change, however, means that new models and new institutional structures are required for drug development based on natural products.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".