The Sunlight Experiment · Author

Justin Cooke

Herbalist and author of The Sunlight Experiment. A background in emergency medicine, a degree in Western herbal medicine, and a decade spent building this library of plant monographs.

Browse Herbal Monographs Read the Blog

Role Herbalist, author & editor

Qualifications BHSc, Western Herbal MedicineMaster Herbalist DiplomaEmergency Medical Technician Certificate

Institutions Torrens University AustraliaWild Rose College of Herbal MedicineSAIT Polytechnic

Experience 10+ years in health science writing & research

Other Work Founder & Editor, Tripsitter.comProduct formulation, Cafely

Where This Came From

I came to this from emergency medicine, where the potency of pharmaceutical medicine is impossible to miss — a few milligrams of glucagon can turn a near-comatose patient into an alert, functioning person in minutes.

The inverse is just as stark. Around 10 mg of rocuronium paralyzes every skeletal muscle in the body, the diaphragm included. Botulinum toxin acts in nanograms and is lethal in microgram doses. Both are just molecules, and knowing where a molecule came from tells you nothing about where on that range it sits.

Later I spent time at an ayahuasca retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon and watched plants produce effects on the human body every bit as decisive. That was the part I couldn’t reconcile. Pharmaceuticals dominate modern healthcare and are generally single molecules with well-characterized mechanisms. Plants are chemicals too — often hundreds of them at once, which makes them far harder to study, but not inherently weaker. So what actually accounts for the difference in how seriously the two are taken?

Most of my professional work over the decade since has stayed somewhere in that same territory. I have worked as a health science writer and researcher, founded and edited Tripsitter.com, and worked on research and product formulation for health and functional-food brands, including Cafely.

The answer isn’t the quality of the evidence alone — it’s how much of the picture you’re willing to look at. So this project works on three fronts:

Tracking and analyzing the research as it’s published.
Giving traditional knowledge the weight it has earned rather than treating it as folklore.
Working with the plants directly.

Herbs, nutrients and nootropics are all part of the same question — what genuinely works for the conditions we fall ill from, regardless of where it comes from.

How This Library Is Made

I have been building this database for over a decade. Every monograph was originally researched and written by hand, and I have spent the last several years constantly updating them — which is why they’re only now being published on The Sunlight Experiment again.

These days I use AI to optimize the research process. My AI assistant runs a deep research pass on each herb, pulling together the available literature and building out the first working draft. I then go through that research myself and check it against the underlying sources.

From there, the research goes through another extraction pass. The system identifies the constituents involved, along with every pharmacological action and health condition that comes up in the research. Those relationships are then organized and weighted using an evidence-ranking system I built.

That information feeds back into the rest of the library. Research on one herb can update its constituent pages, action pages, and condition pages at the same time. The goal is to build a connected research system rather than a collection of isolated monographs.

None of those updates are published automatically. Everything goes through a review gate first. I spend a good chunk of most mornings going through new research, checking proposed changes, and reviewing page updates before I approve them for publication. AI can do much of the extraction and organization, but it doesn’t get the final say on what appears here.

This project started as a way to expand my knowledge and organize my studies while I was at university, and that’s what it will continue to be. It’s a place for me to run research, collect traditional knowledge, and record my own empirical knowledge on the use of plants as medicine as I continue to work with them.

I don’t care whether this site ranks in Google, or earns any money. I care that the information is thorough and accurate. This project is for me, but published online for public benefit.

Selected Monographs

All monographs →

A sample of the pages that best show what the library is trying to do.

Muira Puama An Amazonian nervine with a long traditional record and thin clinical evidence, set out side by side.

Catuaba A widely sold Brazilian botanical where the species and naming confusion gets untangled first.

Passionflower A classic nervine, with the traditional record and the clinical trials set side by side.

Tea The longest monograph here, and the anchor for a whole branch of the phytochemistry.

Yerba Maté A deep monograph paired with practical preparation guides, which is the shape most entries are heading toward.

The Sunlight Dispatch

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