NINACACA, Peru - High in the Peruvian Andes, a shaman rubs a fluffy white rabbit all over Chris Kilham's body, murmuring in Quechua, the language of these barren plains. Then she slits the animal's throat and lets the blood run into a tiny grave.

To Mr. Kilham, the offering - an appeal to the gods for a bountiful harvest of maca, a local tuber - is just another day at the office.

Part David Attenborough, part Indiana Jones, Mr. Kilham, an ethnobotanist from Massachusetts who calls himself the Medicine Hunter, has scoured remote jungles and highlands for three decades for plants, oils and extracts that can heal. He has eaten bees and scorpions in China, fired blow guns with Amazonian natives, and learned traditional war dances from Pacific Islanders.

But behind the colorful tales lies the prospect of money, lots of money - for Western pharmaceutical companies, impoverished indigenous tribes and Mr. Kilham.

Products that once seemed exotic, like ginseng, ginkgo biloba or aloe vera, now roll off the tongues of Westerners. All told, natural plant substances generate more than $75 billion in sales each year for the pharmaceutical industry, $20 billion in herbal supplement sales, and around $3 billion in cosmetics sales, according to a study by the European Commission.

Although the efficacy of some of the products the herbal ingredients go into is hotly debated, their popularity is not in doubt. Thirty-six percent of adults in the United States use some form of what experts call complementary and alternative medicine, CAM for short, according to a 2004 study published by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health.

Mr. Kilham believes multinational drug companies underutilize the medicinal properties in plants. They pack pills with artificial compounds and sell them at huge markups, he says. He wants Westerners to use the pure plant medicines that indigenous peoples have used for thousands of years.

"People in the U.S. are more cranked up on pharmaceutical drugs than any other culture in the world today," Mr. Kilham said. "I want people using safer medicine. And that means plant medicine."

Easy going and earnest, Mr. Kilham, 55, caught the plant bug after taking an herb walk at an organic farm in Natick, Mass., in 1971. A self-described hippie, he was already into "yoga, natural foods and meditation" and the discovery that plants had medicinal properties had a profound effect. He created a course in holistic health at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he is now on the faculty, and made his first overseas trip - to India - to track down exotic flora.

Now he can identify unusual plants by their Latin names and he proudly regales the uninitiated on their individual properties. Shortly after leaving Lima on a trip taking French businessmen to the Peruvian Andes, he stopped the van and enthusiastically explained how the tropane alkaloids in a dusty plant he spotted by the side of the road are used by ophthalmologists to dilate pupils for eye examinations.

Such properties are often well known by indigenous peoples. So-called bioprospectors can make their fortunes by bringing those advantages to the attention of companies who identify the plant's active compound and use it as a base ingredient for new products that they patent.

Some 62 percent of all cancer drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration come from such discoveries, according to a study by the United Nations University, a scholarly institution affiliated with the United Nations.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/business/worldbusiness/01hunter.html