科学家观察到大猩猩可以使用植物提取物来治疗疼痛。

撰文/播音:道格·梅因（Doug Main）

翻译:许楠

审校:张艺箫

Here’s a short piece from the May 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section we call Advances: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology and Medicine:

Orangutan Medicine by Doug Main

以下是2018年5月刊中来自“前沿：科学、技术与医学前沿快讯”的栏目的一篇文章：

Orangutans Use Plant Extracts to Treat Pain

大猩猩利用草药提取物治疗疼痛

Humans aren’t the only animals that have discovered medicinal products in nature

人类不是唯一发现了自然界中药物的动物

Medicine is not exclusively a human invention. Many other animals, from insects to birds to nonhuman primates, have been known to self-medicate with plants and minerals for infections and other conditions. Behavioral ecologist Helen Morrogh-Bernard of the Borneo Nature Foundation has spent decades studying the island's orangutans and says she has now found evidence they use plants in a previously unseen medicinal way.

药物不是人类特有的发明。我们发现许多动物，从昆虫到鸟类再到非人灵长类动物，都能够用植物和矿物来治疗自己的炎症和其他病症。婆罗洲自然基金会的生态行为学家海伦·莫罗-伯纳德（Helen Morrogh-Bernard）在猩猩岛上进行了数十年的研究，并找到了大猩猩们会以我们之前没有了解过的方式来使用植物进行医疗的证据。

During more than 20,000 hours of formal observation, Morrogh-Bernard and her colleagues watched 10 orangutans occasionally chew a particular plant (which is not part of their diet) into a foamy lather and then rub it into their fur. The apes spent up to 45 minutes at a time massaging the concoction onto their upper arms or legs. The researchers believe this behavior is the first known example of a nonhuman animal using a topical analgesic.

在20,000多小时的专业的观察中，莫罗-伯纳德和同事们看到了10只大猩猩会偶尔把一种特殊的植物（不在它们的食谱中），咀嚼成沫状后涂抹在皮毛上。它们会花费45分钟来将这个调制物揉到胳膊或者腿上。研究人员认为这一举动是非人类动物使用局部镇痛药的首个例子。

Local people use the same plant—Dracaena cantleyi, an unremarkable-looking shrub with stalked leaves—to treat aches and pains. Morrogh-Bernard's co-authors at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Palacký University Olomouc and the Medical University of Vienna studied its chemistry. They added extracts from it to human cells that had been grown in a dish and had been artificially stimulated to produce cytokines, an immune system response that causes inflammation and discomfort. The plant extract reduced the production of several types of cytokines, the scientists reported in a study published last November inScientific Reports.

当地的人会用这种植物——龙血树，一种有着梗状叶子的不起眼的灌木——来治疗疼痛。莫罗-伯纳德在捷克科学学会的合作研究者们来自捷克帕拉斯基大学和维也纳医学院的化学系。他们将这种植物的提取物添加到了人类细胞中并进行培养，人工刺激使之产生细胞因子——一种由炎症和不适引起的免疫反应。该植物提取物可以减少多种细胞因子的产生。去年十一月，他们将这项研究发表在《科学报告》上（Scientific Reports）

The results suggest that orangutans use the plant to reduce inflammation and treat pain, says Jacobus de Roode, a biologist at Emory University, who was not involved in the study. Such findings could help identify plants and chemicals that might be useful for human medications, de Roode says.

这一结果说明大猩猩利用了这种植物来减少炎症并治疗疼痛，没有参与这项研究的埃默里大学的生物学家雅各布·德·鲁德（Jacobus de Roode）说这一发现会促进鉴别可以用于人类医学的植物和化学物质这一研究领域的发展。

In creatures such as insects, the ability to self-medicate is almost certainly innate; woolly bear caterpillars infected with parasitic flies seek out and eat plant substances that are toxic to the flies. But more complex animals may learn such tricks after an initial discovery by one member of their group. For example, an orangutan may have rubbed the plant on its skin to try to treat parasites and realized that it also had a pleasant pain-killing effect, says Michael Huffman, a primatologist at Kyoto University, who was not involved in the new research. That behavior may then have been passed on to other orangutans. Because this type of self-medication is seen only in south-central Borneo, Morrogh-Bernard says, it was probably learned locally.

对于一些物种比如昆虫来说，大部分的自我治疗的能力是与生俱来的。长毛熊毛虫会感染寄生蝇，它们会寻找并且使用对寄生蝇有毒的植物。而对于更高级的动物来说，群族中有一名成员发现了某植物的药用作用，其他的成员便会跟着学习。例如，可能最初只是一只大猩猩在皮肤上涂抹了植物来治疗寄生虫，并且发现它还有奇妙的止痛作用，没有参与该研究的京都大学的灵长类动物学家迈克·霍夫曼（Michael Huffman）说。因为这种自我治疗只发现于南婆罗洲，莫罗-伯纳德说，所以这种治疗方法可能具有地域性。