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CHICAGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM BULLETIN 



September-October, 19U5 



STORY OF WARTIME QUEST FOR QUININE IN SOUTH AMERICA— HOW MUSEUM MEN AIDED IT 



By JUUAN a. STEYERMARK 

 assistant curator of the herbarium 



When the Japanese seized the Dutch 

 East Indies, they automatically shut off 

 the United States' only available supply of 

 quinine. The curious situation which 

 existed when Pearl Harbor was attacked 

 was that the quinine tree (Cinchona), like 

 the Hevea rubber tree, although native to 

 the New World, was better known in the 

 Old World where it had been cultivated on 

 a large scale for many years. 



The seeds from the wild quinine trees of 

 Bolivia, which Charles Ledger succeeded in 

 sending to the British and Dutch, germi- 

 nated and produced trees which the Dutch, 

 by careful selection, finally got to yield bark 

 containing as much as 18 per cent quinine. 

 Although many East Indian seedling plants 

 of this high-grade quinine were saved and 

 sent to the United States at the time of 

 Pearl Harbor, the trees were not old enough 

 nor the supply great enough to prove of 

 immediate use. 



On Guatemalan plantations trees of a 

 high-yielding strain from the Dutch East 

 Indies were being harvested and yielded 

 many hundreds of tons of bark, but these 

 were not adequate for war purposes. The 

 United States therefore had to get with all 

 speed as much as possible of the highest- 

 yielding types of wild bark in South America. 



MUSEUM BOOK AIDS PROJECT 



Of prime assistance was Paul C. Stand- 

 ley, Curator of the Herbarium at this 

 Museum, a recognized authority on the 

 Rubiaceae, to which family quinine belongs, 

 by his publications of the latest classification 

 of kinds of Cinchona known to exist in a 

 wild state in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, 

 Peru, Bolivia, and Costa Rica. These 

 treatises indicated the distinctions between 

 the various species and furnished geographi- 

 cal data on localities where the different 

 kinds of quinine trees had been found. 

 Such detailed information furnished the 

 various botanists, sent out by the federal 

 government, with much needed and useful 

 information for field work. 



The writer was the first of the botanists 

 to be sent by the United States government 

 to Ecuador and Venezuela to study the 

 quinine resources of those countries. The 

 principal part of the work was to locate 

 stands of wild quinine trees, estimate the 

 abundance of the stand and amount of bark 

 available, and collect and dry samples of the 

 bark to be analyzed for the quinine content. 



For this task, one had to prepare as for 

 a Museum expedition. Not only were food, 

 clothing, and camping equipment necessary, 

 but also equipment for collecting and dry- 

 ing specimens. 



In parts of the Ecuador Andes, as much 

 as 125 to 150 inches of rain falls annually. 

 The quinine trees are located in dense 



moist luxuriant forests usually at an 

 elevation of 4,000 to 9,000 feet. They are 

 most abundant where the slopes are steepest 

 which necessitates one's climbing gingerly 

 over precarious slopes of loose wet soil or 

 mossy trunks growing near the edge of a 

 bluflf. To reach such localities it is often 

 necessary to spend two or three days on 

 mule trails crossing cold treeless windswept 

 paramos at altitudes of more than 12,000 

 feet where snow sometimes covers up the 

 trail of cold fog and rain obscures the sur- 

 rounding country for hours at a time. The 

 trail is often too slippery or wet to risk by 

 mule and it is much safer to climb or descend 

 the precipitous portions by foot. 



The Cinchona trees usually occur in 

 majestic virgin forest containing a large 

 variety of trees. The undergrowth con- 



Dr. Julian A. Steyermark, Assistant Cura- 

 tor of the Herbarium, resumed his duties at the 

 Museum July 1. He had been on leave since 

 March, 19 US as botanist to explore for sources 

 of quinine in Ecuador and Venezuela for the 

 Foreign Economic Administration of the U. S. 

 After his official work terminated in October, 

 19JH, he conducted two Museum expeditions, 

 one to the "Lost World" section of Venezuela 

 on Ptari-tepui and Sororopan-tepui, and 

 another, sponsored jointly by the Museum and 

 the Venezuelan Ministry of Agriculture, to the 

 high mountains of the coastal cordillera of 

 eastern Venezuela. 



sists of palms, tree ferns, and many species 

 of rubiaceae, melastomaceae, gesneriaceae, 

 urticaceae, and piperaceae. A large propor- 

 tioa of the trunks and branches are covered 

 with a thick growth of mosses and liver- 

 worts, often in long festoons, and a rich 

 variety of aroids, orchids, bromeliads, 

 peperomias, gesneriaceae, and other epi- 

 phytes cover the forest trees, including those 

 of quinine. In order to take a sample of 

 bark from a Cinchona tree, surrounding vines 

 and epiphytes often have to be removed. 



The quinine bark is usually found to be 

 soft and wet. The natural color of the 

 inside bark is a pale yellow, but immedi- 

 ately upon removal of the bark, probably 

 due to rapid oxidation, turns copper or rust- 

 colored. This is a good test for recognizing 

 whether the bark has quinine and other 

 alkaloids in it; the false or related barks 

 do not turn such a color. 



The bark gathered is taken back to camp 

 and dried immediately in a small oven set 

 over a kerosene stove. The heat is so 

 regulated that the temperature does not 

 exceed 80 degrees centigrade, and is usually 

 kept between 55 and 70 degrees centigrade. 

 Drying the bark properly is of great impor- 

 tance. Tests carried out in chemical 

 laboratories in the United States have 

 shown that bark loses its quinine and other 

 alkaloids (quinidine, cinchonine, and cin- 



chonidine) when exposed to temperatures 

 exceeding 80 degrees centigrade. 



NATIVHS' EFFICIENCY IMPROVED 



The cinchona gatherers had to be advised 

 about the most efficient means of removing 

 the bark. Originally they were using their 

 own machetes for bark removal, but we 

 taught them to take off more bark much 

 more quickly by means of a banana-knife 

 blade attached to a pole handle. Pre- 

 viously, they had been accustomed to take 

 off the larger pieces only, leaving a consider- 

 able percentage of the inner bark to rot. 



For practical purposes of getting as much 

 bark as possible, the tree is felled, leaving a 

 stump about two or three feet high. All 

 the bark from the trunk and from the larger 

 branches is then cleared away and gathered. 

 It was pointed out to the gatherers, cascaril- 

 leros or quineros, that in felling a tree a 

 stump 2 to 3 feet high should be left intact 

 and without injury to the remaining bark so 

 the stump sprouts, or retones as they are 

 called, may be formed the following year. 



The Cinchona tree has a habit of sending 

 up from near its base stump sprouts which 

 grow in diameter and in time become normal 

 trunks. In this manner the Cinchona 

 strives to perpetuate itself, and whereas 

 other trees may be weakened and die as the 

 result of forest fires or the woodsman's ax, 

 the quinine tree is able to continue its 

 existence by new ^tump sprouts. 



After the bark is properly dried in several 

 areas, it is sent back to the chemical labora- 

 tories which the United States government 

 set up in Quito, Ecuador. Here an analysis 

 shows within a few days whether the bark 

 collected contains a large or small percentage 

 of total crystallizable alkaloids. In certain 

 cases a given bark is found to contain little 

 or no quinine but a large percentage of the 

 other alkaloids, while in other cases there is 

 little or no other alkaloid but quinine 

 present. If the bark samples prove of 

 sufficient value, the quinine areas from 

 which they have come are marked for 

 further exploration. 



As a result of such surveys carried out by 

 various botanists in many areas throughout 

 the South American countries mentioned, 

 the United States government now has a 

 more adequate knowledge of the locations 

 and yields of wild quinine trees in the New 

 World. Seeds of the higher-yielding indi- 

 viduals are being sown and cuttings from 

 the seedlings grafted on other stock. 

 Plantations are being established in various 

 South and Central American countries for 

 insuring a future supply comparable with 

 that of the Dutch East Indies. At least 

 the Western Hemisphere is preparing itself 

 against any future foreign monopoly or 

 blockade, and has awakened from the long 

 sleep of complacency in which it was caught 

 at the beginning of World War II. 



