FACULTY FOCUS

The Heart of Brightness

Emory researcher and alumna Cassandra Quave—aka ‘The Plant Hunter’—takes readers on a quest for nature’s next medicines in her newly published memoir.

A LIFE WORTH READING ABOUT A medical ethnobotanist, Cassandra Quave has overcome personal hurdles to excel in her field and help humanity by discovering remedies in nature.

Cassandra Quave’s 00C life is like a tropical forest: Varied, colorful, bursting with life, and laced with hidden paths that must be constantly cleared to move along them. Her new memoir—titled The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines—guides readers through a world of plants and the people entwined with them. The story is sometimes dark but mostly uplifting, lit up by her personal revelations and scientific discoveries.

Quave’s story begins with a spirited childhood in rural Florida. It’s marked by dozens of surgeries and chronic pain, but also volunteer work in a hospital and joyful explorations of nature. It moves on to her pivotal years as an Emory undergrad, winds through the Amazon and little-known environments of the Balkans and Italy, graduate school, postdoctoral training, marriage, and children. Quave is now back at Emory where she is curator of the Emory Herbarium and an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology.

“I was inspired to write the book because people have found my work interesting,” says Quave (her last name rhymes with “wave”). “It’s a chance to tell the larger story of my life, bringing together all the different parts of it.”

As a medical ethnobotanist, she studies how people survive when they have few resources other than what is available to them in their immediate environment. Quave follows clues hidden in ancient plant remedies to search for new compounds to combat the modern-day scourge of antibiotic-resistant infections. She holds six patents, is a fellow of the Explorer’s Club, and a past president of the Society for Economic Botany.

Even at her home near Emory, Quave is immersed in plants. She wears a dress printed with lemons as she gives a tour of her terraced garden: Tomatoes, Hungarian peppers, and okra grow amid chives, lemongrass, and Thai holy basil.

Mint scents the air as she crushes peppermint leaves in her fingers and explains how they have soothed stomachaches for centuries. She points out motherwort (sipped in a tea to ease the anxiety of childbirth) and cone flowers (the roots are pounded into a tincture for cold symptoms).

She breaks off a sprig of celandine, a member of the poppy family, and a bright orange resin oozes out. “The resin is toxic in the wrong doses, but it’s also a traditional remedy applied to warts,” Quave says.

Quave scours historical documents and interviews

traditional healers as a first step in her search for medically important plant compounds. These include extracts from the berries of the Brazilian peppertree and the leaves of the European chestnut tree that disarm dangerous antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria— discoveries that have been covered by major media around the globe.

Her home office is a sunroom lush with philodendrons, parlor palms, and hanging pots of ferns. She settles onto her living room sofa and stretches out her legs. One of them is made of metal. The artificial limb is encased in a colorful plastic cover, etched with sprigs of plants and scientific symbols. “I got really tired of having a prosthetic covered in plastic skin,” Quave says. “When people see something fake that’s trying to look like a real leg it confuses them and they tend to stare more. I don’t like pretending to be something that I’m not.”

One goal of her memoir, Quave says, is to provide the kind of role model she herself lacked. “A lot of amputee kids may want to become a scientist or an explorer or an adventurer,” Quave says. “I write about disability from a really honest perspective—the chronic pain and the challenges but also learning how to assess a problem and remove hurdles, whatever your limitations.”

SPARKING HER LIFE’S PURPOSE

Quave has been removing hurdles since she was born in the small town of Arcadia, in rural South Florida.

Her grandfather, father, and uncles worked as land clearers, known as “stumpers.” When colossal longleaf pines in the South were felled for timber to build homes, they used bulldozers to push the remaining stumps out of the ground. They then blew them up with dynamite for grinding at a stump mill to extract turpentine and other by-products.

The difficult work was an essential part of creating arable land for agricultural use, Quave explains.

At the age of twenty, in 1969, her father joined the US Army’s First Infantry Division. He was sent to Vietnam, where he trudged over landscapes recently defoliated by dioxin. Also known as Agent Orange, dioxin is a powerful herbicide that the US military sprayed to eliminate forest cover while fighting the Vietcong.

Her father’s exposure to the herbicide may have led to Quave’s multiple skeletal birth defects, including the absence of part of her right calf bone, Quave writes in her memoir. When she was three, her right leg was amputated below the knee to improve her mobility. That surgery led to a life-threatening staph infection in the toddler. Her leg had to be cut off even shorter, leaving her with a heavily scarred stump that lacks fatty tissue, making prosthetics less comfortable.

Despite this rough start, Quave thrived as a child. She and her younger sister loved running wild in their natural surroundings. “Florida is an amazing place,” she says, “and I was raised to have a strong connection to the land.”

Her father tacked boards to the trunk of a centuries-old live oak in their back yard so she could climb up it to read, reflect, and observe the life forms proliferating on the tree. Tiny orchids sprouted from the bark, and the delicate green fronds of resurrection ferns curled around branches bearded in Spanish moss.

In elementary school she began developing award-winning science fair projects—such as putting a drop of pond water beneath a microscope and

A LIFE AMONG NATURE (left) Quave joined Emory’s faculty in 2013. (top right) Quave rides her horse Sequoia in 1993. (bottom right) Plants have been central to Quave’s career.

FIELD WORK (above) Quave introduced her students to a Florida ecosystem during a 2016 trip. (right) Collecting and cataloging plants.

drawing the creatures she saw living in it. Meanwhile, dozens of surgeries, including the need to correct her hip dysplasia and scoliosis of her spine, sparked Quave’s interest in medicine. She began volunteering at a local hospital while still in her teens, working directly with patients as well as in the lab.

DISCOVERING A NEW PATH AT EMORY

She planned to become a doctor and follow in the footsteps of her pediatric orthopedist, Chad Price 67C, who also happens to be an Emory alum. As an Emory undergraduate, however, majoring in biology and anthropology, new paths beckoned to Quave.

In a class taught by Peter Brown, professor of anthropology, she learned that in some cultures, disabled people are venerated and believed to have special powers. In others, however, they have been left to die. “It made me realize how fortunate I am to have been born in a country with access to health care,” Quave says. “I wondered what would have happened if I had been a child in a village without running water and electricity. I wouldn’t have been able to walk. What would my life had been like?”

In a seminar taught by Michelle Lampl, now director of the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health, she discovered her love for research. “She challenged us to look at primary literature and dissect those papers,” Quave says. “I learned how to evaluate evidence.”

Larry Wilson, an instructor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, sparked her interest in tropical ecology and ethnobotany. Wilson organized an annual student trip to the Peruvian Amazon, and Quave was determined to go even though she couldn’t afford it. Wilson helped her find a way, arranging for a student work-study project at the site.

An Amazon traditional healer named Don Antonio took the young Quave under his wing. “He held a rich knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants that he shared with me,” she says, “from the use of the latex from fig trees to treat intestinal parasites to the red resin of the dragon’s blood tree to treat wounds and diarrhea.”

Quave investigated how reliance on modern medicine caused local healers to stop passing on some helpful traditional practices, leaving a chasm when the stocks of modern medicines ran out. “Ideally we should combine the best of both modern and traditional medicine,” she says. “Some of the best modern-day drugs, including those for cancer and pain, have been derived from plants.”

Months later, Quave opened up her long-awaited acceptance letter from a medical school. “I realized that instead of practicing medicine as a physician, I wanted to discover and develop new medicines inspired by nature,” she says. “I found the courage to crumple that letter in my hand and took another, less-traveled path.”

WIFE, MOTHER, TEACHER, EXPLORER

While doing field work in Southern Italy, she met her match in Marco Caputo, a native of the small town of Ginestra. Like Quave, Caputo spent much of his childhood outdoors, exploring a rural landscape of creeks, waterfalls, and fields full of fragrant, yellow ginestra flowers. In her book, Quave describes their storybook courtship, including a balcony scene, and their wedding in a thirteenth-century castle.

The couple now have four children: Trevor (seventeen), Donato (sixteen), Issabella (fourteen), and Giacamo (eight).

After graduate school and a postdoctoral fellowship, Quave came full circle when she returned to Emory in 2011, initially as a postdoc and then as a faculty member in 2013. Her lab draws on the myriad resources spanning the university, from the Center for the Study of Human Health; to the Antibiotic-Resistance Center, the School of Medicine, Rollins School of Public Health, and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; to the social and physical sciences of Emory College.