Museum shows the public a botanical collection of 800,000 specimens including plants, mushrooms, lichens and dried algae, 16,000 test tubes with seeds of food, medicinal and ornamental species
Inauguration of the Botanical Museum of the University of Padua, in the presence of the Minister of University and Research Anna Maria Bernini and the Rector of the University of Padua Daniela Mapelli. Founded in 1545 and already a UNESCO heritage site, the Museum displays to the public a botanical collection of 800,000 specimens including plants, mushrooms, lichens and dried algae, 16,000 test tubes with seeds of food, medicinal and ornamental species. But above all it leads a journey to the origins of medicine, so far the preserve of researchers and scholars. As evidenced by the history of morphine and aspirin.
“Between the 18th and 19th centuries – Elena Canadelli, the Museum’s scientific director, explains to Italiaambiente – the concept of ‘active principle’, contained above all in medicinal plants, became established. In 1806, the German pharmacist Friedrich Sertüner extracted a substance from opium which retained its typical properties, which he called morphine. From that moment the isolation of the pure substances will allow both the more precise dosage of the active principles and their modification. This is the case of the salicin present in the willow bark, which with small modifications becomes acetylsalicylic acid, known under the commercial name of Aspirin “, which is exhibited in the Museum in its historical version.
“Five centuries later, however, the story continues”, intervenes Telmo Pievani, pro-rector of the University of Padua and coordinator of the eight hundredth anniversary celebrations which ended yesterday. “Biodiversity is so vast that even now here in the University laboratories we do what the Venetians had guessed 5 centuries ago. That is, studying plants to extract active ingredients. We are doing it, for example, with Vinca, a herbaceous species that can become a very powerful anticancer agent and with taxol, which is extracted from Tasso, which is just as important for fighting cancer. With today’s methods, medicine continues to find answers in the plant world. And this is a historical heritage of all”.
Source-www.adnkronos.com