The Plant Hunter
A Scientist's Quest for Nature's Next Medicines
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The uplifting, adventure-filled memoir of one groundbreaking scientist’s quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants.
“A fascinating and deeply personal journey.” —Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants and The Drunken Botanist
Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, Dr. Cassandra Quave has conducted field research everywhere from the flooded forests of the remote Amazon to the isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo—all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs. Dr. Quave is a leading medical ethnobotanist—someone who identifies and studies plants that may be able to treat antimicrobial resistance and other threatening illnesses—helping to provide clues for the next generation of advanced medicines. And as a person born with multiple congenital defects of her skeletal system, she's done it all with just one leg. In The Plant Hunter, Dr. Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell us the extraordinary story of her own journey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ethnobotanist Quave blends memoir, botany, and anthropology in her spirited, globe-trotting debut. "Since the 1980s no new chemical classes of antibiotics have been discovered and successfully brought to market," Quave writes: "That's where I come in." Born without several bones in her right leg and foot, Quave spent time in and out of hospitals, where she nearly died of a staph infection before antibiotics saved her life. This sparked her interest in medicine, and Quave traces her journeys across the globe in search of plant information: she travels to the Amazon, where she receives an herb bath from a healer and reconsiders her relationship to medicine; to southern Italy where she studies the dietary habits of Albanian immigrants; to a Mediterranean island to collect plants in danger of disappearing, such as "purple flowering" Daphne sericea; and into her labs, where she tests her plants against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Her survey is packed with facts—readers will learn that they have willow trees to thank for Advil, that the cocoa plant is where numbing medication comes from, and the Madagascar periwinkle is the source for a chemotherapy drug. Nature-minded readers will find themselves immersed in—and inspired by—Quave's poignant tale.
Customer Reviews
Amazing botany
I love the fact that the species names are listed and the bacteria and viruses species names are listed next to them.