Rosa Porcel distributes her professional time between scientific dissemination, with her books “That was not in my botany book”, Prismmas 2021 Award for the best scientific dissemination book, “Plants that help us”, in which he collects ancestral knowledge and science that houses the human being’s relationship with plants, and the blog the science of Amara; The teaching of biotechnology in the agronomic and natural environment of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and research at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of plants. For her, civilization began with agriculture and considers that today’s humans are as absolutely dependent on plants as the first Neolithic farmers were in their day.
When does the human being begin to see plants as more than a edible?
After starting to eat them, at some point they realized that, applying them in another way they could help heal wounds. For example, observing animals, that there are many that use plants, bark or leaves to heal wounds. It was the need that led to both one thing and the other. When one has nothing else, he handles what he has close. That he was cured, because they used it again. Based on trial and error.
Are we as dependent on plants as in past times?
I think so. Apart from being food, plants contain active ingredients, molecules, which are continually being evaluated to apply in drugs. That has come to change the world and there are many plants that in the future cannot give surprises because they are giving promising results.
Where will those promising plants be?
I always say that the sea and the ground are two niches in which many molecules remain to discover. And, in that sense, I understand that the loss of biodiversity is not sufficiently valued socially. It is a loss of resources very necessary for the human being, to discover many of them. Logically, we are very focused on climate change, which, precisely, one of the many problems it causes is the loss of biodiversity. But so can overexploitation be.
Is there proof of cases like this in ancient times?
Yes. Silfio, for example. It was highly appreciated in food, at the time of Julio César, for example. A very appreciated wild plant was also used as abortive. But all that gave nature was consumed until it disappeared.
When investigating for his book “Plants that help us”, has any surprised?
Yes, a few. To cite one: Belladona. In the nineteenth century there was a canon of beauty with large eyes, so women used it to have dilated pupils. It was crazy, but they didn’t know the consequences. However, the atropine that is, for example, in the drops used in ophthalmology to examine the bottom of the eye.
Has science confirmed the properties that were traditionally attributed to plants?
Definitely. Science never stops and now we have a series of techniques to validate whether the properties attributed to plants are true or not.
Or that have properties that are different from those who were thought?
Also. Like cinnamon, which was used a lot in the Middle Ages in pest epidemics and for gangrenas and today we know that it is good to lower blood sugar and cholesterol.