Turmeric

A patent in Mississippi

Jackson, Mississippi, March 1995. Two scientists win a US patent on healing wounds with turmeric.¹

Suman Das and Hari Har Cohly worked at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, which held the patent.^{1, 2} Their proof began with thirty-two rats, each with a round wound cut through the skin of its back. Some got turmeric powder from Raja Foods of Lincolnwood, Illinois, on the wound, in their drinking water or both.¹

Then came two patients. One, H. W., was a 60-year-old construction worker who smoked five cigarettes a day, drank nearly a pint of gin at weekends, and had opened up his left shin on the cement mixer at work.¹ The patent said its inventors were "the first ones" to treat wounds with turmeric alone, on the skin and by mouth.¹

In New Delhi, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research went through the old books. It found thirty-two references, some more than a hundred years old, in Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindi. One was a 1953 paper in the Journal of the Indian Medical Association.^{1, 2, 3} In October 1996 it asked the US patent office to examine the patent again.³

The examiner rejected all six claims. The university gave up and handed the rights to the two inventors, who fought on. A powder is not a paste, they argued, and the old remedies gave turmeric by mouth only with honey, itself thought to heal wounds.³ The examiner, Shailendra Kumar, ruled that for wounds the paste and the powder came to the same thing. They cut their claims back to surgical wounds that would not heal, and in November 1997 he turned those down too.^{1, 3}

On 21 April 1998 the patent office issued its certificate. It needed one line. "Claims 1-6 are cancelled."¹

The fight had cost the council half a million rupees.⁴ Its chief, R. A. Mashelkar, called it the first time the traditional knowledge of a third-world country, patented in the United States, had been successfully challenged there.⁴ There was a twist, too. The patent holders were Indians, the examiner was an Indian, and the challenge came from an Indian institution.³

India had put turmeric on wounds for centuries.³ How many centuries became a number that one paper after another would repeat.

Yellow birds at the foot of the couch

The Atharvaveda, a Sanskrit collection of hymns and charms about three thousand years old, has a charm against jaundice.^{5, 6} "Up to the sun shall go thy heart-ache and thy jaundice," it begins. It wraps the patient in the colour of a red bull and sends the yellow away, into parrots, into thrushes and into yellow wagtails.⁵

A ritual handbook called the Kauśika Sūtra goes with the Atharvaveda and says what the priest did with the charm.^{5, 6} He gave the patient water with a red bull's hairs in it to sip, sat him on a bull's hide and fed him porridge made with turmeric. Then he daubed him with the porridge from head to foot, laid him on a couch, tied the three birds to its foot by their left legs, and washed the patient off onto the birds.⁵

"The yellow jaundice of the patient, accentuated by his coat of yellow curcuma," wrote Maurice Bloomfield, who translated it in 1897, "is washed down upon the yellow birds, where it belongs."⁵

In the medical compendia of Ayurveda, put together about two thousand years ago, turmeric is a working drug.^{7, 8} Charaka puts it first in his list of ten antidotes to poison and names it among the plants for skin disease.⁷ Sushruta mixes it into oils, ghee and powders for cleaning out ulcers.⁸ A modern digest of his compendium was one of the references that sank the Mississippi patent.¹

Indian saffron

Between AD 50 and 70 Dioscorides, a Greek doctor in the Roman army, described an Indian kind of cyperus that looked like ginger. Chewed, it turned saffron-yellow and tasted bitter, and smeared on the skin it took the hair off at once.⁹ Pliny the Elder called it cypira and wrote that, when chewed, it tasted exactly like saffron.¹⁰ Nobody can now be certain that this was turmeric.^{10, 11}

Marco Polo is often credited with bringing turmeric to Europe.¹² In Fuju, in south-east China, he found "a kind of fruit resembling saffron, and which serves the purpose of saffron just as well."¹³ His translator William Marsden was sure it was turmeric. Henry Yule, a later editor, thought it a gardenia, and Yule's editor Henri Cordier quoted a botanist who thought safflower just as likely.^{13, 14} The chapter says nothing about taking any home.¹³

Green and dry, in Goa

Garcia de Orta's parents were Spanish Jews who had fled to Portugal, and in 1497, made to choose between conversion and exile, they became Christians.¹⁵ Their son became a doctor, sailed for Goa in 1534 and stayed thirty years. In 1563 he printed his book of Indian drugs there, written as conversations with Ruano, a colleague fresh off the boat.^{15, 16}

In the eighteenth conversation Ruano asks about açafrão da terra, the saffron of the earth. Orta tells him there is much of it in the Malabar ports of Cananore and Calicut. People use it "to tinge and season their food", like garlic or like true saffron, because it is cheaper. They also use it for the eyes and for the itch, mixed with orange juice and coconut oil.¹⁶

Then a servant girl comes in. "The curcas have come from Cochin," she says, meaning a kind of small yam. "Does your worship wish that they should be dished up in tamarind juice with the fowl, or thrown into the mutton?" Either, says Orta, and meanwhile bring me a little green turmeric.¹⁶

She comes back with "the green and the dry Açafram and the root." "Inside it is yellow and outside it looks like ginger," says Ruano, and the green root burns so little he can hardly feel it. "Try it when dry," says Orta. The dry root burns, though not so much as ginger.¹⁶

Orta died in about 1568. Soon afterwards the Inquisition arrested his sister Catarina, and her interrogations showed that he had secretly encouraged the family to keep the Sabbath and the Jewish fasts. She was burned at the stake in 1569. In 1580 the Inquisition had Orta's own bones dug up and burned.^{15, 17}

Seventy years after Orta's book, in London, Thomas Johnson added a chapter "Of Turmericke" to Gerard's Herball. To Johnson it was "without doubt" the Indian cyperus of Dioscorides. Shops called it terra merita and curcuma, "and we in English call it, Turmericke." It was a medicine for "the yellow Iaundise", the yellow disease the Vedic priest had washed onto his birds.¹¹

A yellow that will not stay

Paris, 15 June 1815. Two chemists read the Société de Pharmacie a paper on a root they said no chemist had yet analysed.¹⁸

They were Henri Auguste Vogel and Joseph Pelletier, who would later help discover quinine.^{18, 19} They worked the root through water, alcohol and ether and drew out a yellow colouring matter they judged a substance of its own kind. In a lump it was reddish-brown, and spread thin in a solvent a fine yellow. It tasted of nothing at first, then acrid and peppery, and its stains on the skin would hardly come off.¹⁸

Dyers already knew its weakness. The chemist Berthollet had written that no dye gives "an orange-yellow so brilliant", but that it has no staying power.¹⁸ Wool that Vogel and Pelletier dyed came out a fine yellow, survived washing and kept its colour in daylight for the month they watched. In direct sun it faded very fast.¹⁸

By 1910 turmeric's yellow compound had a name, curcumin, and in Bern the Polish dye chemist Stanisław Kostanecki and two colleagues worked out how it was built.²⁰

Brighter than yellow

The Bengali word for turmeric means yellow, and in Bangladesh some of the yellow was lead.²¹

In 2019 researchers from Stanford University and a Dhaka health research centre reported on the country's nine main turmeric districts. In seven, mills that polished the dried roots were adding lead chromate, a bright yellow pigment. Merchants had it added, farmers said, so that poor roots would sell.^{21, 22} Wholesalers said the practice had begun more than thirty years earlier, because shoppers wanted brightly coloured curries. The polishers did not know the pigment was a nerve poison.²¹

The Bangladesh Food Safety Authority destroyed the tainted turmeric and fined the traders. "Mobile court is working on it," its chair, Syeda Sarwar Jahan, said in October 2019. Worried about the country's image abroad, the prime minister's office asked for curbs on exports.²² By 2021 none of the turmeric sampled at the country's biggest wholesale market had detectable lead, down from 47 percent in 2019.²³

The four thousand years

Open a modern review of curcumin and you will often meet one number. Turmeric's medicinal use, says a 2011 chapter by Sahdeo Prasad and Bharat Aggarwal, dates back "nearly 4000 years".²⁴ Later reviews take the number back "to the Vedic culture in India."²⁵

Follow the number back and the trail is short. In 2007 Aggarwal's own lab, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, called curcumin "the Indian solid gold" and dated turmeric's healing uses, wounds among them, "since the time of Ayurveda (1900 Bc)".²⁶ In 2010 a London team wrote that turmeric had been used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine "for at least 4000 years", and gave no source. Its summary said "over 4000", and another paper copied that sentence word for word.²⁷ Before 2007, neither number turns up in the medical papers.²⁸

In 2015 Aggarwal was on Thomson Reuters' list of the world's most influential scientific minds, with seven papers each cited at least a thousand times.²⁹ By September 2018 journals had retracted 28 of his papers, most over images that had been duplicated or manipulated. He had left MD Anderson.^{29, 30, 31} A paper he wrote with Prasad tested turmeric with its curcumin taken out, and was withdrawn because parts of its conclusions went further than its findings.³⁰

The true ages are stranger. Ayurveda's great compendia are about two thousand years old, and the jaundice charm about three thousand.^{6, 7, 8} Turmeric in the cooking pot is older than both. Farmana, in what is now Haryana, was a Harappan town between 2600 and 2200 BC. Archaeologists took starch grains from one of its cooking pots and found cooked curcuma, the turmeric genus, with ginger and what looks like aubergine.³²

And it travelled. A team led by Philipp Stockhammer of LMU Munich found it in the tartar on the teeth of someone buried at Megiddo, in what is now Israel, in the 16th century BC. It is the earliest direct evidence of turmeric outside South and East Asia.^{33, 34} "Anyone who does not practice good dental hygiene will still be telling us archaeologists what they have been eating thousands of years from now!" Stockhammer said.³⁴

So four thousand years is no exaggeration for turmeric in the cooking pot. For Ayurveda's books it is about twice too many.

From shloka to screen

The turmeric case led India to build a library. Since 2001 its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has turned Sanskrit verses on Ayurvedic remedies into text a patent examiner can search.^{3, 35} Mashelkar called it building a bridge "between the knowledge contained in an old Sanskrit Shloka and the computer screen of a patent examiner in Washington!"³

Turmeric is still what Orta's servant girl brought him, green and dry, a root that looks like ginger and burns a little less. What modern trials found is in the Research tab. And open the Mississippi patent today and you will find the rats, the builder's shin and the cement mixer, and at the end, one line. "Claims 1-6 are cancelled."¹