Transcript
Kevin Washington (0:08)
Patty cake, patty cake baker's man when he saw what he saw Then the baker ran Then he did what he did Cause he had to fam Then he wept and he wept. When they found the man. You've crossed over to. Spooked. Stay tuned. So this is frog. Bright green, the size of your fist. Lives high in the canopy of the Amazon rainforest. 100ft high. Can't even see it high, but you can hear it. Right before the dawn. Thousands of them. Croaking, pulsing, throbbing. A chorus echoing through the darkness. The Kashinawa people, an indigenous tribe of the Brazilian Amazon. They've been listening to this song for as long as they have been a people. And they've come to understand about this creature. They know if you take a secretion off its skin, this milk white waxy stuff, and you put it on a burn, it will heal you. Not like fix a cut. I mean heal the insides of you. They call this medicine combo. But that's not what was called at the beginning. In the beginning it was called something else. I'm going to tell you the story, though it was told to me a long time ago. Generations ago. Kashinawa were in trouble. Some kind of sickness tore through the village. People were dying. And the medicine man, the paze, he's trying everything. Every root, every bark, every leaf. He knows nothing is working. People keep dying. So this old shaman, he makes a decision. He walks into the forest alone. Deeper than he's ever gone. And there in the dark, he drinks of the sacred vine. And he sits and he waits. And that night she comes. The grandmother spirit of the forest. She doesn't speak. Instead, she reaches up, way up into those trees and she brings down a frog. Bright green white spots on its belly. And she shows him how to scrape that secretion off its back. How to make little burns on the skin and put the medicine right there, directly into the wound. When the paje opens his eyes again, he can still hear the frog singing. He goes back and does exactly what the grandmother spirit showed him. And one by one, people get well. From that day forward, they call him Page Tampo. And when he finally passes away, this old man, full of years, surrounded by the grandchildren of people who should have passed away from that disease. They say his spirit did not leave. He went into the frogs, merged. The medicine was named in his honor. Kambo. And recently, in Rome, Italy, University laboratory, a sample of that frog secretion. It ends up in the desk of a scientist named Vittoria Ospalmer. The man who discovered serotonin nobel Prize nominee, one of the most important pharmacologists of the 20th century. And this man peers at combo under a microscope and calls it, and I quote, a fantastic chemical cocktail. Because it's inside that frog are peptides no one has ever seen before. A painkiller 40 times more powerful than morphine, a natural antibiotic material that fights inflammation, that regulates blood pressure. And now There are over 70 pharmaceutical patents based on that frog. Billion dollar companies trying to figure out how to synthesize what the Kashinawa already have. But how do they know? Don't have microscopes, centrifuges. How do they know you can't swallow it? How do they know to burn those holes first? How do they know the dosage? How do they know which frog? Out of thousands of species in that rainforest, how did they know? Trial and error. Possible. Statistically. So the scientists, they sit with the elders, the ethnobotanists, the anthropologists, researchers with notebooks and recorders and reasonable questions. They ask very politely, how did your people figure this out? The elders answer. They say, the grandmother's spirit told us the pencil stopped scribbling. The scientists, they smile politely. Then they ask the question again. Different words, looking for the real answer, the rational answer. The elders blink back at them a long moment, until one of them finally says, what part of the grandmother spirit do you not understand? Now, Now, for this spook story. I'm going to travel to Peru to meet Ladoy Ska. Now, Ladoyzuka. She wants to help the communities of her homeland by building libraries and schools. She's on a boat with some friends on her way to a very special place.