Pretty flowers, right? These are the Madagascar rosy periwinkle, or as the Italians like to call them, the “Flower of Death”. I’ve heard rhetoric about how the cure for cancer is in nature and actually for certain situations, I couldn’t agree more. In fact, it was nicknames like “Flower of Death” and its use in folk medicine that grabbed the attention of medicinal botanist in the 1950s. Soon, researchers discovered that it could prolong the life of mice with leukemia and it was developed by Eli Lilly and approved for use in 1963 as Oncovin, or as we know it today, vincristine. Originally vincristine was terribly expensive to produce and required one TON (actual, not figurative) of dried leaves to make one ounce of vincristine. Eli Lilly bought up a ranch here in Texas and started growing plots of periwinkle plants and at one point in history it was considered the most expensive product in the world. We still use a lot of vincristine in our patients and now the drug is generic and one vial costs between 8-15 dollars and it is synthetically made rather than drying tons upon tons of leaves.
The guy in the picture is Dr. Svoboda in 1976 laying on bags of dried periwinkle leaves and holding a beaker of vincristine. He is credited with its discovery. Nature is cool, but remember, not all things natural are benign.
