At the 86th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), held in Newcastle upon Tyne in September 1916, the President of Section K read a paper prepared by Mr Edward Morrell Holmes FLS, 'Lecturer in Materia Medica’ at the Pharmaceutical Society.[1]  To meet the nation’s urgent need to avoid shortages of vital plant-derived drugs, Holmes proposed, ‘the collection of herbs by instructed children, the establishment of public drying-houses, and the cultivation of certain plants, Belladonna, Henbane, and Digitalis’. The President was Professor HG Greenish of the Pharmaceutical Society and the session he chaired was a ‘Discussion on the Collection and Cultivation of Medicinal Plants’. The scientists joining the discussion identified three goals: improvement of the alkaloidal value of the plants; improvement in the yield of essential oils; and the definition of the most favourable conditions of cultivation for each particular species. Such practical matters were however not addressed by scientists during World War I (WWI), or in the peacetime years that followed.  Although in Oxford Sir Robert Robinson was making advances on the chemistry of alkaloids (including drugs) during the 1930s and 40s[2], links between academia and growers of medicinal plants in Britain were few, as they had always been.[3] The problems outlined in 1916 at the BAAS meeting had to wait until WWII to be addressed, when they were tackled through the Oxford Medicinal Plants Scheme (OMPS) led by 'Will' James who had been appointed to Oxford's Botany Department in xxx by its professor, Arthur Tansley.

Research by OMPS during World War II informed the efforts of the Ministry of Supply’s Vegetable Drugs Committee (VDC), whose remit was to help the nation avoid shortages of plant-derived drugs previously imported from Germany.

After improving assay methods that revealed how much of the drug (or its precursor) could be detected in plant tissues, OMPS was able to demonstrate to growers, and to collectors of wild plants, that the highest yield of hyoscyamine, hyoscine, and atropine (tropane alkaloids) came from newly matured leaves of young shoots of Atropa belladonna (below). After trials at the Oxford Botanic Garden and other sites, nitrogen fertilization was recommended to growers because of its beneficial effects on drug yield. Comparing over 40 isolates of A. belladonna from around Britain, OMPS was found that growers were already using the best strain.  

Also producing tropane alkaloids was Datura stramonium; a new, high yielding strain was found and passed to one commercial grower. Collectors of Digitalis purpurea  (foxglove), digitoxin were directed to North Wales where the most productive strains were identified.

Sources

[1]Anonymous. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 1916, p.507.  London: John Murray.

[2]Oxford University's Waynefleet Professor of Chemistry from 1930-1955, Robinson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1947 for his work on plant products, especially the alkaloids.

[3]Francis Ransom (1859-1935), head of the his family’s herb growing company in Hitchin, Herts, was a rarity. He worked in the laboratories of the Pharmaceutical Conference on improving methods for the extraction and estimation of the alkaloids from belladonna, research which produced a series of papers in scientific journals from 1885 onwards. Respected by the scientific community, he was President of the British Pharmaceutical Conference in 1910. 

Read Biology War Committee, or return to Oxford Medicinal Plants Scheme