1 of 3
Travis Melin. Insert photo by Bruce Montagne
212birchopen
“We believe we’re sitting on a kind of motherlode of medical possibilities,” Dr. Robert M. Carlson (right) of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, says of birch bark’s potential. The chemistry professor is credited with helping to unlock potential uses for betulin and other products from the birch. Inset: Birch are prevalent around Lake Superior, even in the sands of the Grand Sable Dunes in Michigan.
2 of 3
Jay Steinke
212birchflowers
The serenity of birch heals the soul and now it may help heal the body.
3 of 3
Jeff Frey
212birchpavel
Dr. Pavel Krasutsky at UMD searches for industrial uses of natural resources. The former Ukrainian was recently honored with his home country’s highest award.
Long the inspirer of poets and wayfarers, the north woods' hauntingly beautiful birch is now inspiring a new breed of admirers: university medical and industrial researchers. These poets of the petri dish hope to soon pen "healer" to the list of names borne by a true Giving Tree that has provided fire, food, shelter, containers and even transportation to the peoples of Lake Superior's shores.
“We believe we’re sitting on a kind of motherlode of medical possibilities,” says Dr. Robert M. Carlson, a professor of chemistry with the University of Minnesota-Duluth and UMD’s Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI).
The birch’s role as helpmate was established near the beginnings of time, according to the Anishinabeg or Ojibway people, who call it wiigwaasag. (See related story below).
The more familiar name of birch grows from the ancient English words brice or beorch, “to shine bright white.”
The very compound that makes the birch “shine bright white” has been tentatively linked to treatment for such devastating human ailments as some melanomas or cancer, several forms of herpes and even for AIDS.
The compound, betulin, is “about as water soluble as butter,” explains Carlson. It’s probably what makes birch bark such a good preserver of foods and such a great outer layer for canoes and shelters.
Betulin takes its name from the Latin, scientific name for the birch family, Betula, of which there are about 50 species in Europe, Asia and North America. Betula papyrifera, the paper or canoe birch, is the most common of that family in the Lake Superior region.
Found in abundance within birch bark, betulin can be adapted into the “betulinic acid” that many medical researchers believe may cure or control certain health problems. Betulin itself may also have medicinal properties.
Chemists identified betulin in bark some 200 years ago. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize what they had. “They discovered it too soon,” Carlson says. “They discovered it … and put it on the shelf.”
Carlson figuratively took betulin down from the shelf as he pursued a project to find uses for bark left from industrial use of the birch. He then literally took the compound down a few UMD halls to the laboratory of Dr. M. Reza-ul “Raj” Karim in the biology department.
For 30 years, Karim has researched treatments for herpes viruses. Carlson asked if betulin might be useful to his work.
After initial testing, Karim was amazed at the results. In fact, he called over a graduate student just to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
“Do you think I’m seeing right?” Karim says he asked the student. She verified his observations.
“Then I started testing this very seriously. Then we went for a patent.”
UMD currently holds patents related to the use of betulin from the birch’s bark. The university through NRRI is trying to create partnerships with national and international firms to determine the medical and industrial-use potentials of this probably most recognized tree in the north woods.
Along with Carlson and Karim, the NRRI’s Dr. Pavel Krasutsky has been instrumental in initially linking birch to these possibilities. He is examining industrial applications.
“This is the most pure compound that we isolated or extracted with the help of the chemistry department,” says Karim, who also has worked with some plants, used as medicine in Africa, to try to find herpes treatments.
Finding a compound in a natural plant with potential medicinal applications is extremely rare. To find such a potential through the simple serendipity of wanting to efficiently use up some leftover bark … well, that’s nearly unnatural.
“Once in a lifetime, if you hit something like this …” says Karim, letting his open sentence speak to the rarity. “It was out of the blue.”
Carlson, credited with getting the betulin ball rolling, smiles when he relates the painstaking and time-consuming methods for finding medical uses from natural plants.
This path is nothing like Hollywood’s “Medicine Man,” who lives for years in a tropical rain forest testing plants and plumbing a native people’s traditional lore and life to find one plant with the smallest of potential.
Carlson’s professional interest in birch - personally, the tree has always attracted him, he explains - began only about three years ago. While working with the Lake Superior Forum, the Citizen’s Advisory Group of the International Joint Commission (IJC), Carlson became friends with managers of regional paper industries, who were also members of the forum. These friendships and common interest in sustainable development in the Lake Superior watershed led to discussions about working together to produce more than paper from a harvested tree.
“Economic sustainability was the issue. This value-added approach could be one answer,” Carlson says.
Carlson began working with regional pulp producers to make their industrial “waste streams” more profitable. Birch bark, tons of birch bark, gets discarded or burned daily in most processes.
Carlson and his university and industry colleagues set out to find a more economically, socially and environmentally valuable use for bark.
UMD’s Natural Resources Research Institute, through which Carlson works, often teams up with private or public enterprises to find economic opportunities with environmentally sound practices, says NRRI Director Michael J. Lalich. The institute, established in 1983, also performs government-funded research to lay the groundwork for good regional decision-making.
Many NRRI researchers explore forest resources. NRRI helped to improve a process that uses products from the tamarack tree to enhance printing capabilities and for bio-medical uses relating to cell separation. The LAREX Co. in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, now uses some of this research. NRRI researchers also are helping to develop a fast-growing hybrid poplar that can be sown on normally unused farmland, which could provide an ample tree supply for industrial needs while reducing the need to harvest natural forests. Using the whole tree efficiently is an NRRI aim.
“We believe there is tremendous potential for chemical derivatives of our wood products,” Lalich says, such as pharmaceuticals, lubricants and adhesives.
Lalich and Carlson both emphasize “potential” when talking about the early stages of testing medicinal compounds. Even after “potential” has been identified, it takes time and money to determine what, if any, value exists.
“It typically takes $100 to $200 million to take a pharmaceutical to market,” Lalich estimates. There are tests and more tests, and then federal review to prove a product’s safety. If betulin does have medical uses, it could be “somewhere close to the year 2010” before any products reach the shelves. That’s why the University of Minnesota is negotiating potential partnerships with large firms that can afford the necessary and costly next steps. Of course, should the potential prove out, there’s a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical carrot for an investor.
In the case of the birch’s betulin, there is cause for optimism. The medicinal promise of betulinic acid is established. To a chemist, manipulation of the naturally occurring betulin into betulinic acid doesn’t seem difficult.
About 15 percent of birch bark is betulin. It can be felt as the almost powdery residue one finds either on bark or just within its paper-thin and thicker layers. That makes birch bark “a single pure source of a single pure compound,” an incredible rarity, says Carlson.
Like other naturally occurring compounds, betulin may end up with none or fewer of the detrimental side effects from synthetic compounds, according to Carlson.
A researcher at the University of Illinois in Chicago about a year ago labeled betulinic acid from betulin as a potential weapon against melanoma tumors, which annually affect an estimated 34,100 Americans and cause 7,200 deaths. That researcher determined that 50 pounds of bark might produce 100 doses of betulinic acid.
Betulin research by Carlson and Raj Karim show potentials exist for battling some forms of herpes. Herpes viruses, something of a bane to humans, cause cold sores, genital infections, chickenpox, shingles, infectious mononucleosis and have been linked to multiple sclerosis and to Karposi’s sarcoma, the cancer that often delivers the fatal blow to AIDS sufferers. In UMD’s research, betulin-based treatment was several times more effective than the current most popular herpes treatment.
Birch as a healing resource isn’t new. Along with the 5,300-year-old mummified remains of a man in the Alps was found birch fungus, [piptoporus betulinus,] the mildly toxic properties of which are speculated to have given this ancient traveler temporary relief from intestinal parasites. Ancient woodlands people molded wetted birch bark into a form-fitting cast on broken bones. And birch sugar, taken as lozenges or gum, has reduced the occurrence of ear infections in children in research at the University of Oulu in Finland.
These tidbits come from among the forest of news and journal articles gathered by Carlson. Near his desk sits a somewhat dog-eared copy of “The Birch,” an insightful and poetic tribute to the tree by Lake Superior area artist and writer John Peyton. Carlson’s current passions are the birch and regional sustainable development.
Medical healing is not the only benefit possible from materials in the “waste stream” of industrial forest use. Krasutsky, who will head the NRRI’s new chemical derivatives laboratory, has developed a turpentine product from the sugars of the Scotch pine. He is working on uses of birch, too.
That means chemical derivatives from trees may boost the region’s economic health. NRRI is working with regional companies to explore local development of the “value-added” products from birch, pines, other tree species and peat.
Overall, Carlson predicts, this cooperative effort might “reduce waste and at the same time add jobs and other value.”
The discoveries are far from over for the popular tree of poetry, often immortalized in story and song. This giving tree seems destined to deliver more gifts.
“Birch bark, which paper companies throw away, we can have lots of beneficial use of it,” predicts Karim. “Some day, I’ll talk to you about what else we have in mind. I can’t tell you the secrets!”
For Carlson, the chemist, a mystery yet remains. The mystery lies on the forest floor, where he’s often seen the bark shell of a birch intact long after its center rotted.
“We still haven’t totally solved,” he says, “the riddle of why it doesn’t decompose.”
In Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Heritage, lives a birch whose existence is the source of annual celebration. The birthday of Benny Birch is feted in early June each summer (11-13 this year). Benny, a survivor of nearby construction nearly two decades ago and of disease that has claimed many of his closest relatives more recently, was adopted as St. Joseph’s Heritage’s mascot 17 years ago. His birthday has been noted each year since.
In the generous spirit of birch, Benny’s Birthday Party is also an annual fund-raising event for St. Joseph’s Foundation to defray costs of the St. Joseph’s Care Group, which operates a number of health, nursing and other care facilities.
Protector, preserver, provider
It is said that those familiar black “scars” on the bark of Birch come from the time when the tree protected Wenaboozhoo, sometimes called Naniboujou, from the talons of enraged Thunder Beings.
The man-spirit protector of the Anishinabeg scaled a cliff to the Thunderbirds’ nest and killed their young, trying to protect the Anishinabe (sometimes Anishinaabe) people from the frightful storms that the Thunder Beings tossed down. He also stole some of their powerful feathers.
Wenaboozhoo fled down the cliff when the adults returned, and he took refuge inside a hollowed birch. It fell with its opening to the ground and Wenaboozhoo protected within. The Thunder Beings couldn’t breach the bark despite their terrible tearing. Eventually they left, and Wenaboozhoo emerged unharmed.
Wenaboozhoo declared Birch a friend to humans, a helpmate. And the man-manitou gave a special gift to Birch. To this day, its bark endures even long after the tree has fallen and its center decayed.
Because of this, a great respect must be given to Birch, explains David Aubid, teacher of the Ojibway language at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
Tobacco must be given to the tree before it’s cut down or its bark taken for the many, many uses found by the Anishinabeg. David describes how his mentor taught him to search for a birch, and then to reach high up and carefully slice a right angle into the first layer of bark. When this was pulled back, if the bark cracked, it could not be taken. But if the bark were supple and bent without break, then the proper gifts and words could be given and the bark removed from the tree. Skillfully done, the tree will not die.
For the woodlands people, like those who lived around Lake Superior, Birch held a pervasive importance similar to that of Buffalo for the people of the Great Plains. It could become the durable skin of their houses or of their canoes. It sometimes provided protective outer clothing. Birch bark could be used to help winnow and later its preservative qualities protected the harvest of manoomin, or wild rice, and of berries through the winter. Some still know how to fold bark into a liquid-tight pot that can withstand even boiling water for cooking.
Ever ready to help, Birch’s quick ability to ignite was crucial when a fire meant life or death. To those who knew Birch well, medicine could be made from its parts. Once, it is said, sugar flowed freely from Birch and Maple. Now that gift comes only with much work.
Wonderfully artistic baskets made by the Anishinabeg from birch bark could preserve everything from the umbilical cord of an infant to crucial foodstuffs for long winters. Sometimes a layer of the bark became paper for the Anishinabeg and then the birch preserved something as important as food - knowledge.
When he hears about the possibilities for Birch being studied by chemists and others, that doesn't surprise David Aubid. The Anishinabeg are long familiar with this helpmate. “There’s a whole science to using birch bark,” David says, not referring at all to university science.
Birch was among the three trees claimed in perpetuity by the Anishinabeg people from Lake Superior when they signed treaties ceding certain lands to the government of the United States. Harvesting rights throughout those ceded territories were retained for Birch, Cedar and Maple - all considered crucial for the people’s survival.
This is just some of the story of Wiiwaasag, of Birch. There are many stories that can be told only when the days are shorter and the waters frozen.