Biodiversity loss threatens new treatments

Janice Hopkins Tanne reports from the Value of Plants, Animals, and Microbes to Human Health, a conference held last weekend at the American Museum of Natural History in New York

Plants, animals, and microbes important to human health are being lost at an alarming rate, delegates heard when they attended a conference on the value of plants, animals, and microbes to human health held in New York last weekend.

“The biological world is evaporating before we get a chance to thoroughly account for and understand it,” said Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which jointly sponsored the conference with Harvard Medical School, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the National …