Remarks on my academic family tree
All scientists are shaped by the people who train us. I fell into the rabbit hole of chasing down my botanical predecessors. This is what I found.
The evolution of scientific thought among individuals and even entire fields is shaped by the people we learn from. I have learned from many great minds over the span of my training and career—from the books and articles they’ve written to the university lectures and conference presentations they’ve given. Among all these, though, the greatest influence comes from the scientists who have been by your side, showing you the craft of your trade in the lab or outdoors in the field as you run experiments and gather data. They are the scientists who mentor you through the process of learning research techniques, writing and presenting your findings, and culminating the opus of your work with a dissertation and award of degree. In other words, these minds are both the sources of wisdom and the gatekeepers to your career.
My Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Brad Bennett, was recently honored with a lifetime achievement award in our field: The Distinguished Economic Botanist Award from the Society for Economic Botany (newly renamed The Society for Ethnobotany). During his speech, he had a slide recognizing the people that shaped his understanding of ethnobotany.
After showing this slide, he casually mentioned that the tree goes back to Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician known as the "father of modern taxonomy.” This is where a systematic organization of life under the principles of binomial nomenclature (scientific names) began!!
My jaw dropped! Descended from Linnaeus?! Now that is an impressive academic pedigree. It also explains my obsession (which Dr. Bennett instilled in me) with using the correct, updated scientific names in all areas of science. There is no quicker way to lose my esteem of your character as a scientist than if I see you either use common names for organisms or get the scientific name wrong! This heritage would explain so much! And yet, I didn’t have the complete tree!
So, I began digging.
What did I find?
At the top of the post, you can see what I’ve discovered so far. Each connecting line represents a direct line of training from academic mentor to mentee, and it goes back over three hundred years! These include connections between graduate students and supervisors, post-doctoral mentors, and research assistantships. I actually found traces going back centuries further than this for Linnaeus, but I ran out of space on my document.
The Harvard Line
Much to my frustration, I’ve been unable to find the name of Oakes Ames’ mentors online. Still, I do know that he took over the Harvard Herbarium upon the retirement of Asa Gray (1810-1888), considered one of the most important American botanists of the 19th Century. As Ames was educated in Botany where Gray served as a professor of botany, the likelihood of a mentor/mentee relationship there must be high. Like Gray, Ames is widely recognized as an expert in the field. He is credited with studying and classifying countless members of the Orchidaceae (orchid) plant family. His library and herbarium collections are now housed at Harvard. According to the Orchid Herbarium of Oakes Ames website:
Before being integrated into the larger collection, the Orchid Herbarium of Oakes Ames contained about 131,000 plant specimens, around 3,000 flowers in glycerin, 4,000 specimens in liquid, and hundreds of line drawings that supplement the specimens. The main collection is accompanied by the Orchid Library of Oakes Ames, which houses about 5,000 books, reprints, and journals. The Ames Herbarium includes important ancillary documentation, including beautiful and remarkably detailed drawings from herbaria collections around the world, plus illustrations and line drawings of orchids prepared by Blanche Ames, the wife of Oakes Ames.
One of Ames’ most remarkable trainees was Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001), who following his education at Harvard, spent his career there as a professor. Schultes is known for his ground-breaking studies with indigenous communities in the Americas on hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. From his early career work on peyote to his explorations of psychedelic mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico, and studies of ayahuasca and chacruna in the Amazon—he is a legendary figure in the field.
The Amazon Conservation Team has created a beautiful multimedia website in tribute to his Amazonian travels. Schultes trained and taught several prominent scholars known today as experts in the field, including Wade Davis, Mark Plotkin, Doel Soejarto, and Michael Balick, who mentored my Ph.D. advisor, Brad Bennett, in his postdoctoral training period. He even taught and mentored the leader in integrative medicine, Andrew Weil, MD, when Weil was an undergrad.
The Linnaean Lines
I will be traveling to the home turf of Carl Linnaeus in Uppsala, Sweden, next month, and I look forward to visiting his garden and summer home while there!
One thing that surprised and delighted me is that I found evidence of two lines of descent from Linnaeus—one through Bennett’s Master’s Degree supervisor (Daniel Austin) and one through his Ph.D. supervisor (Clyde Ritchie Bell).
There are too many accomplishments from these scholars to cover them all in the scope of this post, so I’ll just highlight a few:
Elias Magnus Fries (1794-1878) was a botanist and mycologist. He made tremendous contributions to the classification of mushrooms and is known as the “Linnaeus of Mycology." He was trained by Linnaeus’ son, Carl Linnaeus the Younger, a talented botanist in his own right.
Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882) was a chemist and the first to separate aluminum and isolate the element beryllium. His work was also heavily influenced by his supervisor, Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848), a chemist and physician known as one of the founders of modern chemistry.
George Chapman Caldwell (1804-1907) was the first professor appointed at Cornell University. As a professor of agriculture and analytic chemistry, he chaired and led the chemistry department to a position of global prominence.
Willis Linn Jepson (1867-1946), at the age of 25, co-founded the Sierra Club with John Muir and Warren Olney. He also founded the California Botanical Society.
Not everything is roses in this family tree, though. Edward Murray East (1879-1938), an esteemed plant geneticist and botanist who worked on developing hybrid corn, strongly supported eugenics and wrote racist statements in his books.
What about diversity?
Not to state the obvious, but when looking at the family tree, you may have noticed that my predecessors were all white, all men. No women, no ethnic or racial diversity. The change began in the tree with Dr. Bennett’s training of many women and underrepresented minorities in science and continues with me!
So far, I have trained 122 undergraduate researchers, five doctoral students, four postdoctoral fellows, five medical residents, and 14 visiting international scholars in the Quave Research Group lab and the Emory Herbarium. I have strived to maintain an open and supportive environment, and it has been my joy to see trainees from myriad ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, languages, genders, and abilities thrive in their research and help each other along the way. Diversity is the future of science, and I hope that someone 300 years from now will take a fresh look at their academic tree and see this moment of change.
If you would like to support future researchers in this field, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the lab through Emory’s secure giving site. Funds allow me to host and train more students in the science of nature’s great pharmacy.
Yours in health, Dr. Quave
Cassandra L. Quave, Ph.D. is a scientist, author, speaker, podcast host, wife, mother, explorer, and professor at Emory University School of Medicine. She teaches college courses and leads a group of research scientists studying medicinal plants to find new life-saving drugs from nature. She hosts the Foodie Pharmacology podcast and writes the Nature’s Pharmacy newsletter to share the science behind natural medicines. To support her effort, consider a paid or founding subscription, with founding members receiving an autographed 1st edition hardcover copy of her book, The Plant Hunter.
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This was super interesting to read. I love all the detail you provided. And I especially like how you addressed the lack of diversity in the past and how you aim and work towards a more diverse future.
So glad you started a new, diverse, line. But I bet there were many women who were not academically trained but were taught in the field.