09/01/2026
🌱 🐒 Elodie Freymann has attracted international attention for her research in Uganda’s Budongo Forest, where she documented wild chimpanzees using medicinal plants to self-medicate.
Now, she’s expanding that research to explore what she calls “medicinal entanglements and shared forest pharmacies” — the interconnected relationships between animals, plants, and the medicinal resources they depend on.
At the heart of this work is a question that has largely gone unasked: How do we protect the medicinal knowledge and resources of other species?
“We at least have some safeguards in place to protect traditional ecological knowledge in human communities,” Freymann explains. “But there are virtually no protections in place for the medicinal resources that other species depend on.”
Her research is helping to make the case for protecting not only forests and their biodiversity but also the knowledge and relationships within them.
🔗 Read more in an edited transcript of Freymann’s remarks at a Bioneers 2026 panel: https://buff.ly/MgKfM3y
📸 Photo: Ozzie the Chimp eating the bark of a medicinal tree. Credit: Elodie Freymann
