Scientists on Reddit

Cassandra Quave

Ethnobotanist at Emory University

u/Cassandra_Quave ↗AMA only

How we know it's theirs

The 2017 r/science AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 1 post and 75 comments from u/Cassandra_Quave, all from 2017, most often in r/science.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/science

On “Science AMA Series: I’m Cassandra Quave, a medical ethnobotanist. I study the botanical ingredients used in traditional medicines for infectious disease to discover new solutions for antibiotic resistance. AMA!”

I just read about you for my botany class at Penn State University! What is the most interesting plant you've come across? Why do you find it so interesting?

u/Cassandra_Quave replied

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Hmmm... this is a tough one. There are so many interesting plants that I've worked with over the years. I'm most interested in understanding human uses of wild plants. One really neat one that has multiple uses is Arundo donax - or the giant reed - in Poaceae (grass) family. In southern Italy, this plant is used as a tool (as a fork and wine barrel tap), in construction (to build grain bins, fencing for gardens, vineyard support), as a bartering stick (items that are traded are tracked by carved notches on the reed), as bedding (the leaves once were used to stuff mattresses), and as a medicine (the white internode membranes are used to stuff bleeding lacerations as a hemostatic). So many amazing uses from what some would just see as a weedy grass!

More moments

A redditor wrote in r/science

I'm personally against the extraction method utilized by western medicine. Such as stripping a plant down to one chemical constituent to be used in a medicine. I think plants ha e grown the way they do and have been used as traditional medicines as a whole. Not to have their…

u/Cassandra_Quave replied

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Very good concern. Plants did not grow to become medicines; they grew to survive and give rise to progeny. And the medicinal chemicals they did produce were produced to achieve that end. So I do not think that the plant as a whole is always the optimal way to develop potent treatments to diseases. Rather, they contain medicinal value that we can utilize.

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