The Madagascar periwinkle packs a lot of healing power into its delicate pink flowers. Although native to the African island after which it is named, for centuries it has been cultivated and used in medicinal practices around the world — including Chinese, Ayurvedic, European and African traditions — commonly as a treatment for diabetes, but also for malaria, asthma, toothache and other maladies.
Extracts from the flower are used as a remedy for eye infections in the Caribbean, where Damian Cohall, a Jamaican-born ethnopharmacologist at the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados, learnt of it through interviews with elder members of local communities. Research in his laboratory identified compounds in the plant that inhibit an enzyme that regulates insulin levels and could lead to treatments for type 2 diabetes (see go.nature.com/3djmhyr). “The fact that these anti-diabetic properties are known in traditional practices validates the Indigenous science that existed well before Western knowledge systems,” Cohall says.
Similar dynamics have played out repeatedly over the past 500 years or more, as Western science has become imposed as the dominant knowledge system around most of the globe. In the process, many alternative ways of understanding the world have been marginalized. “There has been for a long time, and there is still, a distrust of Indigenous knowledge among scientists,” says Marie Roué, an environmental anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. She says that Indigenous knowledge is often dismissed because it incorporates religious or spiritual elements. It also tends to be passed on orally and through cultural traditions, making it hard to formalize in the manner prized by the Western empirical method.
However, Indigenous and local communities hold unique insights that can enhance people’s shared understanding of the natural world and inform attempts to protect it. Recognizing this, scientists such as Cohall and Roué are working in partnership with Indigenous and local groups to preserve and amplify these insights, integrate them into their own research and co-produce fresh knowledge with these communities.
BT - Nature DO - 10.1038/d41586-025-00798-6 LA - ENG M3 - Article N2 -The Madagascar periwinkle packs a lot of healing power into its delicate pink flowers. Although native to the African island after which it is named, for centuries it has been cultivated and used in medicinal practices around the world — including Chinese, Ayurvedic, European and African traditions — commonly as a treatment for diabetes, but also for malaria, asthma, toothache and other maladies.
Extracts from the flower are used as a remedy for eye infections in the Caribbean, where Damian Cohall, a Jamaican-born ethnopharmacologist at the University of the West Indies in Cave Hill, Barbados, learnt of it through interviews with elder members of local communities. Research in his laboratory identified compounds in the plant that inhibit an enzyme that regulates insulin levels and could lead to treatments for type 2 diabetes (see go.nature.com/3djmhyr). “The fact that these anti-diabetic properties are known in traditional practices validates the Indigenous science that existed well before Western knowledge systems,” Cohall says.
Similar dynamics have played out repeatedly over the past 500 years or more, as Western science has become imposed as the dominant knowledge system around most of the globe. In the process, many alternative ways of understanding the world have been marginalized. “There has been for a long time, and there is still, a distrust of Indigenous knowledge among scientists,” says Marie Roué, an environmental anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. She says that Indigenous knowledge is often dismissed because it incorporates religious or spiritual elements. It also tends to be passed on orally and through cultural traditions, making it hard to formalize in the manner prized by the Western empirical method.
However, Indigenous and local communities hold unique insights that can enhance people’s shared understanding of the natural world and inform attempts to protect it. Recognizing this, scientists such as Cohall and Roué are working in partnership with Indigenous and local groups to preserve and amplify these insights, integrate them into their own research and co-produce fresh knowledge with these communities.
PB - Springer Science and Business Media LLC PY - 2025 T2 - Nature TI - How researchers can work fairly with Indigenous and local knowledge UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00798-6 SN - 0028-0836, 1476-4687 ER -