REHOVOT, Israel: It stops vampires in their tracks, pulverizes bacteria, cures athlete's foot and gives a tasty kick to spaghetti bolognese.
　　 Garlic, a key ingredient of folklore, is being put to the test by some of Israel's leading scientists out to unlock the herb's secrets.

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science are focusing on allicin, a pungent compound that is nature's way of protecting garlic from insects, fungi and bacteria in the soil.

Weizmann Institute biochemist David Mirelman heads a four-person team that has cloned the gene for allicin, synthesized it and stabilized the highly volatile molecule, which is responsible for all that is good and bad in garlic.

The overwhelming odour of crushed garlic is the result of the chemical reaction that creates allicin by combining the substrate - allin - with an enzyme called allinase.

But tests conducted by Mirelman and a multitude of scientific studies show that allicin is also highly effective at preventing high blood pressure, treating diabetes, curing diarrhoea, lowering the risk of heart attacks and killing cancer cells.

In laboratory tests on rats, they also found garlic prevents weight gain and might even lead to weight loss.

"Wonder drug"

Mirelman calls it a "wonder drug" and says it is in the league of aspirin, discovered more than a century ago and still a staple multipurpose drug highly effective at preventing strokes, among many other things.

"Aspirin is not an antibiotic but it helps to prevent strokes, headaches, pain and so on. Allicin has a proven effect on micro-organisms so it's an antibiotic; it kills micro-organisms," said Mirelman.

The Israeli biochemist stumbled on garlic's medicinal properties on a trip to China for a conference on dysentery. A Chinese physician there showed off his cure for the often deadly stomach illness - a bottle of crushed raw garlic soaked in alcohol.

"He gave dysentery patients a half a glass of the yellow liquid twice a day," said Mirelman. "I asked him how well it worked and he said it's been curing people for 5,000 years.

"So I took the recipe and studied it. I isolated each of the components in garlic to see if they were effective against a battery of micro-organisms and found the most effective component was allicin.

"It was highly effective at killing a wide range of micro-organisms, from fungi to bacteria and malaria."

Rome's secret weapon

Mirelman is now trying to find a scientist with anthrax supplies to test whether allicin can kill anthrax spores.

Garlic has been a staple item in medicine chests from China to Italy for thousands of years.

Its virtues were the subject of legends, and fodder for ancient poets and the Bible, in which the Israelites bewailed the garlic left behind in Egypt when they fled to the wilderness with Moses.

Egyptian hieroglyphics record that garlic was given to the workers who built the pyramids to keep them strong and healthy. Ancient Greek athletes would eat raw garlic before competitions, and soldiers consumed it before going into battle.

It was the secret weapon of the Roman Empire, whose centurions ate garlic to keep disease - especially stomach bugs - at bay. The ancient father of medicine, Hippocrates, recommended garlic for infections, wounds, leprosy and digestive disorders.

In the Middle Ages, garlic was used to prevent the plague, and hung around the neck as a charm to ward off demons and the occasional vampire. During World War I, it was used to prevent gangrene when penicillin and sulfa drug supplies ran out.

A team of doctors at Israel's Tel Hashomer hospital used Mirelman's allicin in controlled tests on rats to gather evidence that garlic combats high blood pressure and prevents diabetes and heart attacks.

It received top marks, destroying the build-up of plaque in coronary arteries, reducing the symptoms of diabetes and bringing down blood pressure in rats that were fed a high fructose - sugary - diet for three weeks before being given allicin.

The blood pressure and sugar metabolism of rats given allicin after the high fructose diet went back to normal within two weeks.

However, the blood pressure and sugar metabolism of rats in a control group that received no allicin went sky high and remained there.

During the tests, researchers noticed an interesting side-effect. None of the rats given allicin gained weight.

"They ate the same amount as the control group but their weight did not change," said Tel Hashomer hypertension expert Telma Rosenthal, who now wants to conduct tests on fat rats to see whether allicin causes weight loss.

Preventing weight gain

Mirelman has not yet discovered why garlic would prevent weight gain but, in separate experiments, he has found the herb destroys cancer cells in petri dishes at an amazing rate.

Unfortunately it also kills live cells, prompting Mirelman to develop an anti-cancer treatment that is tumour specific, meaning it targets only the cancer cells.

It will take 10 years but Mirelman believes it could help combat breast cancer and other tumours.

From Chinadaily.com.cn