Earth Day Speaker

Dr. Jim Duke

Presentation: "A Tale of Four Gardens". Covering some Biblical, Maryland, and Amazonian Ethnobotany. May include a walk in the woods (weather permitting).

Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Time: 12:00pm

Location: Lane University Center, Frostburg State University

Dr. Jim Duke Biography
Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929, James A. "Jim" Duke is a Phi Beta Kappa PhD (botany, 1961) graduate of the University of North Carolina. Following military service, Jim undertook postdoctoral activities at Washington University and Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. There he began studies of neotropical ethnobotany. From 1963 to 1965, Duke was ecologist with the USDA, joining Battelle Columbus Laboratories (1965-71) for ecological and ethnobotanical studies in Panama and Colombia.

Fluent in Spanish, Duke has studied and/or lectured widely, concentrating on tropical ecology, medical botany, and crop diversification. Widely traveled, Duke "cut his tropical eye teeth" in Panama where he was resident from 1966-68. While working on an encyclopedia of economic plants, he has collaborated with the National Cancer Institute on both their AIDS and cancer-screening programs and their Designer Food Program (to prevent cancer). His data bases on the ecology, nutritional content, folk medicinal uses and chemical constituents of economic plants are being widely utilized.

Duke's major goal lately is to reverse the disdain for alternative medicines in the US, where, as in the Third World, a larger and larger percentage of the people can no longer afford first-world pharmaceuticals. Duke has a contagious interest in natural foods and nutritional approaches to preventive medicine. Lately Duke has been very active in ecotourism in Latin America and is teaching such themes as renewable rainforest products in the rainforests of Amazonian Peru. He has become an expert in the field of non-timber forest products.