My Life & Rollercoaster Career: The Life of a Pharmacognosist + Are Drugs Better Than Herbs [550 pages: available from Amazon; $25.95, paperback; $5.49, e-version]
There are two main reasons why I wrote this book that actually consists of 2 books in one – my Memoir (The Life of a Pharmacognosist) and my republished Newsletter (Are Drugs Better Than Herbs?). My memoir covers at least 3 or 4 generations of my family history for our daughters and granddaughter, among other things. The second book is basically my lifetime’s thoughts and work that I want to leave behind, not just for my family, but mainly to alert millennials so that they may be aware of the vicious cycle that can be broken or bypassed by natural medicines by not using the inappropriate chemical technologies we all learn in college. This vicious cycle has been created by us older folks and is passed on to our future generations through no fault of their own, just as we have done the same with our damaged environment.
When I first published my Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients Used in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics (Wiley, 1980), I had sent my book proposal to only 2 publishers, a trade publisher and Wiley. Wiley responded quickly and within weeks I was offered a book contract with 15% royalties and an advance of $15,000. That book became one of Wiley’s best sellers in the natural product field. Since then, it has gone through the 2nd Edition (1996, with Steven Foster as my co-author) and is now in its 3rd Edition (2010) retitled Leung’s Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients…,authored by I.A. Khan and E.A. Abourashed. I did not participate in its revision for 2 main reasons. First, because of the confusion in the natural-product field among scientists between traditional herbs and pure chemicals, much of the data on ‘natural products’ were not credible, and I simply couldn’t have time to evaluate them and find enough data worthwhile to use for the purpose of my book which had to be relevant to traditional herbal medicines (THM). Second, I finally realized that my book could be useful for drug discovery because of the chemicals reported in plants from the literature were relevant to the research and development of chemical drugs, though they were often useless when being applied to THM. Not only that, they would further continue to muddy the research and production of genuine herbal products and formulas; and I didn’t want to continue to contribute my part to this confusion.
After my positive experience with Wiley, I thought publishing lay books would also be at least as easy. However, my first such book, Chinese Herbal Remedies,was accepted and subsequently published successfully by Universe Books in 1984, only after a dozen book proposals had been rejected by other publishers. Regardless, that was also published in England by Wildwood House, and was shortly translated into German and published in Germany by Diederichs Gelbe Reihe in 1985 as Chinesische Heilkrauter. Since 1993, it is under the new title, Chinese Healing Foods and Herbs, published by AYSL Corp, now out of print. I have considered republishing it, especially as an e-book.
One major thing I have learned from all this is that lay publishers, including major ones, are mostly fed materials by book agents along with their reviewers who often are THM- or fact-challenged. Hence some of their books published are egregious. I have critically reviewed at least two of them in my Newsletter between 1996 and 2004. One was downright plagiarism on a dozen remedies (at least from my herbal book) and the other outrageously ignorant on THM, compiled by 2 Pharm D’s. They were also illogical or fuzzy-headed in their thinking, which the late Dr. Varro E. Tyler (Dean of Pharmacy at Purdue), well known for his popular book The Honest Herbal, agreed with me. These are all reprinted in my book. My question is, “How could such books have been published by these well-known publishers?” My thinking is that the old-boy network is still alive and active in the lay publishing business. It’s not what you know, but whom you know. Obviously, I am at a disadvantage, because my slight mental handicaps never allowed me to initiate making friends or schmooze with others with ease, especially after coming to the United States. The few close friends I have, or used to have, are from high school, though most of them are gone. The other few good friends were made while raising our girls here. Because of my honest and sometimes tactless nature in my work, my direct and frank interactions with colleagues in my field sometimes offend them. They seem to openly tolerate incompetence and unethical conduct, hence don’t like anyone who criticizes them. Although I have mellowed quite a bit during the past 10 to 15 years, seeing poor performance or unethical conduct in my colleagues still bothers me. So I can’t help but speak out. My rationale is that if we see something sloppy in research and cheating in manufacturing products without speaking out, we are just condoning mediocre research and substandard products. This, in fact, has happened for decades. Earlier on in my rollercoaster career, I had spoken out and lost the only 2 jobs when I worked for someone else. But since then, I have made it on my own as an entrepreneur and successful herbal scientist, without compromising my principle and family values.
Consequently, being outside of the old-boy network, I decided to get my new book self-published without having to go through a middleman. After 3 years, the book is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I am not sure how much support my colleagues would give me in this project or how many books they would buy, so I count on the younger generation to notice my sincerity of doing this for them, and start supporting me. I recommend buying the e-version because the paperback does not have an index anywhere as comprehensive as searching on line with the e-book.
[TO BE CONTINUED…]