The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7156 p68
July 14, 2001

Writing on the wall
Peruvian wonder
Shrubby Arctic

Writing on the wall

There are powerful indications that the social and professional role of the pharmacist needs to change, and quickly. The old traditional dispenser-shopkeeper image, which the public has been content to accept, is no longer acceptable to our profession. It was made evident during the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s branch representatives’ meeting in May that members are keen on restructuring the Society and its established methods of work to meet contemporary challenges, instead of plodding on in a parochial and inward-looking fashion, the product of a deeply rooted conservatism.

Older members of the Society in particular show a tendency to indulge in nostalgia and hanker after simpler times and more leisurely ways of working, which do little to sustain their status in the world of combined health care and more advanced treatment methods. It is true that we had more colour and variety in our distant past than we have today. Making pills, suppositories, ointments, mixtures, eye-drops and injections to order called for considerable technical skill. Such methods of practice had an attraction sadly lacking in a dispensing system that involves little more than slapping a computer-generated label on a prepackaged batch of a medicine. Yet it was slow, cumbersome, possibly more open to errors of measurement and judgement than today’s procedures. Modern society and modern government show scant sympathy with such picturesque practice, opting for the streamlined and mechanised variety.

The other criticism of pharmaceutical practice is perhaps more serious, and certainly alarming. The ugly philosophy of consumerism has resulted in the public perception of a pharmacy as just one more shop in the high street. The ruling passion for getting more for less and three for the price of two overrides all other considerations, including those of professional service and ethical determinations. Once you decide that medicines are articles of commerce, like cabbages, baked beans and tinned soup, and are to be regarded in the same light, you are in trouble. The customer looks for value for money, and that is something that a lay person cannot possibly estimate when it comes to pharmacologically active substances with a propensity for good or evil, depending on how appropriately or inappropriately they are handled. The powerful forces of global commerce, which dictate not only to purchasers of products but to governments which seek to control them, ensure that medicines shall be freely available from the supermarket and the corner shop, without any significant restraint in availability or reference to circumstances that ought to be considered.

Pharmacy is faced today with a necessity to overcome its aversion to joining the professional expertise it enjoys with that of the other parallel expertise of professions engaged in health care and human safety. At the same time, it needs to discard its old shopkeeper image, time-honoured though this may be, insisting on its high moral and ethical standards and its unrivalled background of the chemistry and application of drugs. The way forward is bound to prove far from smooth.

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Peruvian wonder

A paper in Science for 27 April, from three archaeologists from Peru, Chicago and Illinois, offers tantalising glimpses of an unprecedentedly early settlement in the New World. The site of Caral in the Supe valley of Peru has yielded radiocarbon dates of between 4,090 and 3,640 years before present. It is situated 23km inland from the Pacific coast and 200km north of Lima. Interpretation of the evidence gathered has thrown back to about 2627BC the emergence of an urban lifestyle and monumental architecture in the Americas. At the same time it has cast serious doubt on the previously held view of relationships between inland and coastal settlements in early Peru.

This discovery makes Caral the first complex society to be established in the history of the New World. At one time the site held eight sectors of domestic dwellings and also grand, stone-walled residences provided with two circular plazas and six enormous platform mounds built from quarried stone and cobbles gathered from the river bed. The largest mound was four storeys high and probably connected with a centralised religious cult.

Samples for radiocarbon analysis were obtained from 18 excavated groups of plant remains. Some were from bags woven from reeds, which were apparently used by the builders of the city for hauling stones and were left inside the mounds.

There are indications that a new system of irrigation agriculture was adopted. Farmers who had found themselves deprived of cultivation in the flood plain of the Supe river moved several kilometres and started growing squash, beans, guava and cotton. To do this they had to irrigate the desert land, which they achieved by constructing a shallow channel to tap water from the river upstream. Since Caral is many centuries older than surrounding urban centres, it is taken as evidence of a move to establish coastal satellite villages from inland sites at some time.

It is considered that the ancient Peruvians moved inland from the coast in order to supplement their earlier fish diet with carbohydrate-yielding plant crops. Nevertheless, in Caral abundant fish bones and mollusc shells have been discovered. Fish may have been obtained by trade, the cotton crop being used in the manufacture of nets for fishermen elsewhere.

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Shrubby Arctic

It is strange to think of the bleak Arctic as a place of shrubs and trees. Nevertheless, it bears three principal shrubby growths, the dwarf Arctic birch (Betula nana), willows (Salix spp) and American green alder (Alnus crispa), and a tree, the white spruce (Picea glauca). One indication of climate change has been discussed in Nature for 31 May by researchers in Alaska, and it concerns the expansion of deciduous shrubs in the region.

During the past 50 years the shrub abundance has increased widespread over more than 320km² of the landscape, when historical and modern aerial photographs are compared. This expansion will affect energy partitioning in summer and the trapping and distribution of snow cover in winter. It will also increase the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic, a region believed to constitute a net source of carbon dioxide in the world.

The investigators report that 36 of the 66 pairs of photographs compared show a dramatic increase in the height and diameter of individual shrubs, an infilling of areas that showed little scrub in 1950, and expansion into areas that were previously shrub free. On the tree line, the spruce forest has become more extensive and denser. The differences detected are mainly the result of increased growth and expansion of alder, partly because the photographs more readily reveal the darker foliage, but birch and willow have also become more abundant.

Since Alaska is a location where human and natural disturbances are minimal, much of the increase in shrub abundance must be attributed to a recent change in climate, comparable with that in the early holocene period when warming produced shrub invasions. Moreover, extensive peat deposits offer evidence that the region has been an important sink for global carbon in the distant geological past. Increased primary production inferred from the photographic record may well contribute to surface energy exchanges and changes in high-latitude carbon budget. We ignore such changes at our peril.

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