Issue #24: Summer 2009

To Make the World a Better Place

by Herb Rosengarten & Henry Chong, MD'56

Two grads reflect on a life of study, accomplishment and travelling the road together.

When Memory Elvin and Walter Lewis first met in the Biological Sciences building at UBC in 1952, she was finishing her BA in science and he was working on his master’s in biology and botany. Walter was struck by her long red hair and sparkling hazel-green eyes; he immediately took her out for a coffee at the Bus Stop cafeteria. A couple of years later, Walter left UBC to obtain his PhD in biology at the University of Virginia, while Memory took a position as a medical technologist in the Pearson TB Hospital in Vancouver, but they kept in touch. Friendship blossomed into romance: in 1957 they were married, and by 1965 they had two children.

There the story might have ended, for Memory at least: a career in science was not encouraged for women in the 1950s, especially for those who had started a family. But Memory and Walter were not a conventional couple. In the following years their contributions to biological and botanical research would mark them out as pioneers, and together they would become world-renowned as ethnobotanists and ethnopharmacologists.

Memory’s work initially took her in a different direction. In 1966 she completed a doctorate at Leeds University in medical
microbiology, and the following year she accepted a faculty position in the school of Dentistry at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Walter was now an associate professor of botany and director of the herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1968, when she was doing research in chlamydial infections, Memory was invited to examine a young man who had been admitted to a local hospital with a puzzling case of a sexually-transmitted illness that would not respond to any treatments. The patient, subsequently referred to as Robert R., struggled with his illness for six months. Racked with disease, he was unresponsive to antibiotics and unable to generate an immune response that would have ordinarily controlled his infection. He died in May 1969.

Memory and lymphologist Marlys Witte stored separate samples of Robert R.’s blood and tissues, hoping that a technology might be developed that would help them unravel the mystery. Memory deduced that some kind of viral infection had compromised the patient’s immune system; she gave a conference paper to that effect in 1970, and in 1973 she co-authored a paper on the case history in the journal Lymphology.

The true nature of Robert R.’s illness did not emerge until the following decade, when scientists identified the human immuno-deficiency virus and showed its connection to what came to be known as AIDS. In 1984, Memory’s interest in Robert R’s case was renewed by the recently published findings on AIDS, and she and Marlys Witte sent their samples for testing by an expert retrovirologist at Tulane University. Memory’s specimens proved conclusively that Robert R. had in fact been suffering from an HIV infection and that his strain differed from the one causing the pandemic then sweeping across the world.

This discovery, made public in 1987, had significant implications for the study of the transmission of AIDS, and was the earliest documented case of AIDS in America. It also demonstrated that the disease might have entered the US many years before its official identification in 1981. Uncovered by the then-novel technique of what Memory calls “retrospective epidemiology,” it would also encourage scientists to forage through tissue and sera banks for clues to the origins of other diseases.

But Memory Elvin-Lewis’s major contributions would come in other areas of medical science. Her work as a microbiologist and epidemiologist at Washington University led to her becoming a leading world expert on plants used in folk dental practices. She became the first woman to be president of the Microbiology sections of both the American Association of Dental Schools and the International Association of Dental Research.

Increasingly focused on the bioreactivity of plants used for healing, Memory’s research interests gradually converged with those of her husband, who was then studying airborne and allergenic pollens of North America. In the 1970s they began working on herbology (the study of folk medicine based on the medical properties of plants and plant extracts) in response to the growing movement for alternative medicine. They were especially interested in the implications of herbal medicine for the development of modern pharmaceuticals, and their research led to the publication in 1977 of what has since been recognized as a standard work in the field, Medical Botany: Plants Affecting Man’s Health, revised and enlarged in 2003.

What gives this research its particular strength (as well as an aura of romantic adventure) is the couple’s painstaking collection over three decades of data and information from indigenous people around the world, including Africa, Asia and North and South America. Initial studies included analysis of tooth care in Ghana, followed by trips to the Amazon in the early 1980s to investigate tooth blackening and extraction by Peruvian and Colombian Indians. “It was the beginning,” says Elvin-Lewis, “of an expanded research project to study the medicinal plants of Jivaro tribes of the upper Amazon that gave us quinine and curare.”

Memory and Walter ventured deep into tropical rainforests to meet with the elders of remote tribes. They analyzed the medicinal properties of herbs and plants for their therapeutic value, their efficacy and (especially important for subsequent development) their safety. The couple’s work was celebrated in a National Geographic special, Secrets of the Rain Forest (1989), and helped to uncover herbal remedies with applications to many diseases, including viral hepatitis, tuberculosis and malaria.

A significant dimension of this kind of research is the threat it can pose to indigenous people whose knowledge and traditions may become vulnerable to entrepreneurial exploitation. Walter and Memory have been exemplary in sharing the benefits of their work with the people who have made their discoveries possible. As principal investigator of the International Collaborative Biodiversity Group: Peru, Walter has been instrumental in the development of Peruvian intellectual property laws regarding benefit sharing with indigenous people.

In like fashion, Memory has lectured extensively in the US, the UK and Australia on policies needed to govern the evolving field of traditional remedies and their exploitation. She was a keynote speaker at the international congress on Indigenous Knowledge and Bioprospecting held at Macquarie University in Sydney in 2004. Only by treating indigenous people as collaborators and partners, argue Memory and Walter, can the full potential of traditional herbal remedies be fully realized, shared and sustained, a view not always taken by colleagues working in the competitive world of modern science and pharmaceuticals.

Their work has brought the couple widespread recognition. Both are Fellows of the Linnean Society of London, recipients of the Martin de la Cruz Silver Medal from the Mexican Academy of Traditional Medicine, and holders of honorary degrees from Andrews University in Michigan. Walter also received an honorary degree from the University of Waterloo. In 2006 they were honoured by the Society for Economic Botany as Distinguished Economic Botanists, the first time a married couple has been recognized.

Awards and titles often signify the culmination of a career, but the couple is as productive as ever. Memory is still on faculty at Washington University (now in the department of Biology), she continues to present at conferences from Mumbai to Mexico and publishes journal articles on the medicinal properties of plants and the issues surrounding profit-sharing. Walter, whose interest in botany began more than 60 years ago raising roses in Victoria, retired from his professorship in 2001 but maintains his position as senior botanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. He is currently engaged (with colleagues from Berkeley and Montreal) on a monograph on the genus Rosa in North America, scheduled for publication in 2010.

Memory and Walter have traveled a long way but they have not forgotten Canada or their alma mater. Memory looks back at her youthful self with a mixture of amusement and nostalgia, recalling the dances she helped to organize as secretary of the Film Society in the early 1950s. “We got all the shorts of the big bands and showed them on screen at Brock Hall. It was a lot of fun. Can you imagine dancing to all the big bands?” She also remembers being a member of the first class in bacteriology held in the new Wesbrook Building (completed in 1951) at the corner of University Boulevard and East Mall. The building housed the Preventive Medicine Institute, an appropriate setting indeed for the beginning of a long and distinguished partnership between two UBC grads dedicated to uncovering the secrets of nature and making the world “a better place in which to live.”

Herbert Rosengarten is a retired member of the UBC English department; Henry Chong is a Vancouver physician who studied with Memory Elvin-Lewis when they were both undergraduates at UBC.