The Plant Hunter by Cassandra Leah Quave

Author:Cassandra Leah Quave [Quave, Cassandra Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

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While I was relishing the progress I was making at the lab bench, I was struggling to fit in with my peers. Working in a basic sciences department was a new experience for me, and I found it difficult to connect with my lab mates. I was an outsider from day one. These other scientists didn’t feel like my people.

My desire to take a multidisciplinary approach to nearly every question I investigated made me a very odd duck in a traditional scientific environment. I wanted to appreciate the magic behind ritual healing while also investigating the chemical mechanisms by which the plant ingredients in such processes worked. My lab mates wanted to understand the purpose of what each gene in the microbe served. To be clear, translational science is built on the foundations of basic science; my work wouldn’t be possible without those studies and mechanistic insights they illuminate. It’s just that my mind didn’t work that way.

But I also quickly discovered how much my approach differed from that of antibiotic drug–discovery scientists. Other scientists developed specialized cellular assays to screen libraries of lab-made compounds in search of drug leads. To me, though, those chemical libraries were irritating and boring. I wasn’t interested in compounds with little structural diversity made out of the minds of humans—I wanted to explore the compounds made by nature, a domain still largely untouched by even the most intrepid of scientific explorers.

There was really only one group of people who understood me. Ever since that first ethnobiology conference in Athens, Georgia, where I’d met Andrea, I knew I’d found my people. Throughout graduate school, Brad had encouraged my attendance at the annual meetings of the Society for Economic Botany (SEB); there, I began to form lifelong connections with friends and colleagues, ethnobotanists and ethnobiologists who dedicated their careers to investigating the myriad and often mysterious ways that humankind connected to nature for survival and for the enrichment of life in art, music, medicine, and more. It was through those early experiences that I learned about the Open Science Network (OSN) in Ethnobiology, a National Science Foundation–funded initiative to train upcoming science educators and develop curricula to be shared on an open and accessible platform on the web, which was a novel concept at the time.

The OSN held educator-training workshops at the SEB meetings, and I learned from incredibly experienced educators as well as the young cohort members who participated in the network. I owe much of my current teaching skills to this training period. It certainly hadn’t come from my brief stint as a middle-school teacher or even from graduate school, where I’d been taught only the most basic pedagogical techniques. Back then I was more worried about a student accidentally blowing up the teaching lab than whether or not I had provided a detailed and useful rubric. To be fair, my worries about lab explosions weren’t unfounded. One student did in fact catch on fire by spilling ethanol on their

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