The difficulty of getting medically promising discoveries from the jungle to market has long vexed ethnomedicine. But in the case of one potential HIV/AIDS treatment, innovative profitsharing arrangements promote drug development and protect the interests of indigenous peoples.

Can the interaction between modern societies and indigenous peoples ever be win-win?

The promise of tropical biodiversity as a library of potentially useful biological agents gives the question renewed urgency, and the experience of ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox suggests that the answer is a resounding yes.

The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, crystallized the notion that indigenous cultures deserve to share in any wealth generated by the commercialization of native plants and animals. Eight years earlier, Paul Alan Cox had put the idea into action in Samoa.

As a fledgling ethnobotanist, Cox traveled to a village he had “picked off the map” and set about gaining the trust of the locals. Before beginning his research, he told the assembled chiefs he wanted to study alongside the village healers and that he would do his best to protect their financial interests. “It seemed like the right thing to do,” says Cox, who in 2005 founded the Institute for Ethnomedicine, with offices in Provo, Utah, and a laboratory in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Cox kept his word. The village recently received a check for $5,000, a benchmark payment from the preclinical development of prostratin, a potential HIV/AIDS drug. While the payment is small (though significant in a coun try where per capita income is $2,100), it shows that the agreements negotiated by Cox actually work. “I grew up in Utah, where, when you irrigate, you want to make sure the water gets all the way down the ditch to that last corn plant,” he says.

In the past, bioprospectors simply took what they wanted, often leaving a trail of lingering resentment. Wary of such intrusions, indigenous peoples learned to keep potential commercial gems to themselves.

But now, as the hunt for medicines derived from exotic plants and animals revives after a dry spell in the 1980s and ’90s - when the promise of genetics and genomics overshadowed the grubby task of dig ging for natural cures - prostratin offers a model for future discoveries.

Cox has midwifed three deals in Samoa, all of which hew to Rio standards - the treaty has been ratifi ed by the European Union and 188 other countries, but not the United States - for the National Cancer Institute, the University of California, Berke ley, and the AIDS Research Alliance (a California-based clinical research organization). Article 15 of the convention states that nations have “sovereign rights” over their natural resources and “authority to determine access to genetic resources.” Accordingly, all three deals were negotiated with the Samoan attor ney general and prime minister. The minister of trade declared prostratin the island nation’s “gift to the world.”

The prostratin story begins in the 1970s, when, as a 19-year-old Mormon mis sionary to Samoa, Cox developed what turned out to be a fortuitous illness. “A healer treated me,” he recalls. “She rubbed roots on my chest and made potions.” He recovered. Later, when Cox’s mother died of breast cancer, he remembered the experience. He wondered if Samoa’s jungles might harbor a treatment for cancer, too. In 1984, he took a sabbatical from a university job and packed his wife and four children off

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