Cassandra Leah Quave

This is an easy and compelling read providing a fantastic insight into the process of modern scientific research - but it's going to be disappointing if you only want to know all the answers about ethnobotany and medicines found in nature because yeah, I bet Dr Quave would too, that's why she's doing the research.

The book does provide enough cool examples of plant-based medicines in traditional knowledge systems (and of zoopharmacognosy!) for me to scribble copious notes and go down many Wikipedia rabbit holes. It makes an excellent case for why this is a really important field to be working in.

It's also intensely autobiographical, and unflinching about the financial barriers to research in the academic world, and the extra barriers and outright hostility faced by women, people of colour, and people with disabilities. I may have picked up the book for the medicinal plants, but I equally enjoyed reading about how she met these challenges, from lancing a boil on her own infected leg stump, to roping in her husband to MacGyver desperately needed lab equipment, but most especially her seemingly indefatigable persistence in gathering mentors, collaborators, and grants despite all the discouragement the establishment could throw at her.

I'd have liked a bit more in depth discussion about the ethics of working with other cultures' traditional knowledge and different ways this can be done poorly or well. She doesn't skim over this really, I just wanted even more. But then too perhaps she's not (despite her clear good intentions and thoughtfulness) the person best placed to judge what's poorly or well done in this respect.… (más)

I love science memoirs—but this one is terrible! There is very little science. What little there is reads like a vague, hand-wavy summary for a speculative grant proposal. And not one that I would recommend funding. There are almost no results, certainly none coming close to matching Quave's claimed ambitions for finding new antibiotics. Toward the end, she finally mentions a few results from her lab, but these are covered in less than a page. Then she pivots to Covid-19, for which she gets funding but again, and unsurprisingly, no results. Basically, I think that this memoir is premature and oversold, and that Quave needs to do less outreach and Congressional lobbying, and more research.

> Ayahuasca tourist camps are scattered around Iquitos as part of a new tourism trend that has emerged in the Amazon over the past twenty years or so. This concerns me. As a sacred plant ritual held in respect for millennia by healers who dedicate their lives to its use for healing, it should not be used as a tourist gimmick. To do so is to divorce it from its original cultural context and value.

> “Cashuka, you have the heart of an indígena, the mind of a brujita [little witch],” he said while gesturing to my heart and then my head. Laying his hand on my still-cramping stomach, he continued with a laugh, “But you have the stomach of a gringa. No more ants, okay?”

> 42 percent of mothers and 15 percent of fathers leave full-time work in a STEM field soon after having children. The causes behind this phenomenon are complex, and include factors ranging from gender discrimination to greater caregiving and homemaking responsibilities for mothers in particular. Unlike working fathers, working mothers are faced with societal stereotypes, such as being painted as too focused on their children and thus less reliable for work. The maternal wall to career advancement and stability in science is real.

> If a safe and effective botanical ingredient with protective activity against COVID-19 exists, the likelihood of it being in my library was pretty high.

> I wish it weren’t the case, but the next COVID-19 might be around the corner. We don’t know. And if it is, it might be an antibiotic-resistant superbug we have no weapons against… (más)