Why Peru and Mall are chosen for the research?

W: So you travel around the world as part of your research. Where do you go and what do you do there?
M: My main research for my PhD is in Peru, in the Peruvian Amazon, and in Mali in West Africa, and I am looking at the medicinal plants used there in traditional societies and indigenous groups for parasitic diseases like malaria, autoimmune diseases like diabetes and eczema and uterine fibroids, and trying to see if there is an overlap, so that if people in Peru and Mali are using a similar species to treat the same disease, that’s a good bet that it is something effective, because they have independently found something useful, you know? There is probably no chance or very little chance that someone in Peru has talked to someone in Mall about, "Oh, you should use this plant for malaria", because they are so separated and they are not going to have the same exact species. But we can look at the evolutionary relations of the plants and say, "Oh, they are using something pretty close to both to treat malaria, so let’s take those plants into the lab first before any of the other ones because they are most likely to be effective".
W: You’ll look for an active ingredient in the plants, some kind of active compound that both plants produce—might it be the same compound or maybe it’s a related compound?
M: It could be and we haven’t gotten that far yet. First I am trying to show that there is a pattern. So now I am trying to test on the crude extracts of the plants, what the efficacy is, and then if something turns out to be really effective, then we would go on and try to narrow it down to one or a group of compounds in the plants.