The American Botanical Council presented its ABC James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature Award in both the reference/technical and consumer/popular categories. For the first category, Il-Moo Chang, PhD, received the award for writing A History of the Korean Ginseng Industry, while the latter category went to Cassandra Leah Quave, PhD, for writing The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines.
 
The 2022 Duke Awards were presented at the 17^th annual ABC Celebration and Botanical Excellence Awards Ceremony, which took place on March 9 in Anaheim, California at Natural Products Expo West.
 
ABC is also naming an honorable mention in each category. For reference/technical literature, the honorable mention is Herbal Formularies for Health Professionals, Volume 5: Immunology, Orthopedics, and Otolaryngology by Jill Stansbury, ND, and in the consumer/popular category the honorable mention is Medicinal Herbs of California: A Field Guide to Common Healing Plants by Lanny Kaufer.
 
ABC gives the Duke Award annually to books that contribute significantly to medicinal plant-related literature, and the fields of botany, taxonomy, ethnobotany, pharmacognosy, phytomedicine, and other related disciplines. The award was created in 2006 to honor the late economic botanist and author James A. Duke, PhD. Duke’s career in economic botany and ethnobotany included working as the lead medicinal plant expert at the United States Department of Agriculture and the authorship and co-authorship of more than 30 reference and consumer books. He was also a co-founder of ABC and served on its board of trustees.
 
Chang is professor emeritus of the Natural Products Research Institute in the College of Pharmacy at Seoul National University. As the former director of the Korean Ginseng Research Institute, he is a leading international authority in the field of traditional Asian medicinal plants, particularly Asian ginseng (Panax ginseng). His extensive historical written work on Asian ginseng in Korea spans from the root’s first recorded use as a traditional food to today’s large international ginseng industry. The book details the importance of Asian ginseng in Korean history and culture. The book goes over Korea’s history of developing and supporting Asian ginseng with research on cultivation, harvest, quality control, chemistry, extraction, pharmacological/toxicological effects, and clinical benefits. Specifically, Chang looked at Korean “red” ginseng, a name given to roots that are teamed according to traditional processes which change the color from beige to dark auburn, which changes the roots’ chemistry.
 
“I am highly honored to accept the ABC Duke Award, and now I feel that a wonderful dream can come true,” said Rian Lee, CEO of Korean Ginseng Corp., who accepted the award on Chang’s behalf.
 
Quave’s The Plant Hunter is a memoir that recounts her global journeys, providing a inside look into ethnobotany – the study of how people of a particular culture or region use local plants. Quave is an associate professor in the Department of Dermatology in the School of Medicine at Emory University and the curator of the Emory University Herbarum. She has authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific publications, and is a past president of the Society for Economic Botany, recipient of several academic awards, and host of the “Foodie Pharmacology” podcast, which discusses the connections between food and medicine.
 
“I am absolutely thrilled to be recognized with the ABC James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature Award. I wrote The Plant Hunter with the goal of sharing the amazing science behind botanicals in an accessible form, through the story of my own journey to becoming an ethnobotanist. This award is especially meaningful to me as I met Jim more than 20 years ago in the Peruvian Amazon. I so admired his books and thoroughly enjoyed discussing the amazing medical potential of plants with him. It is such an incredible honor to come full circle back to that moment with this award.”
 
“I believe that Jim Duke would wholeheartedly approve of these two books that received the 2022 ABC awards in his name,” Mark Blumenthal, ABC founder and director, said. “So would our late friend and colleague Steven Foster, who was an integral part of the Duke Award committee’s selection process since we started granting this award in 2006, when Jim was still alive. In fact, Steven and I discussed both of these books as candidates before his unexpected passing in January.
 
“Both books excel in communicating some essential elements related to the value of medicinal plants,” Blumenthal continued. “On behalf of all of us at ABC, our heartiest congratulations to Professors Chang and Quave for their important contributions to the world’s medicinal plant literature.”

Previous ABC Duke Award recipients include Christopher Hobbs’s Medicinal Mushrooms (2021); Flora of the Voynich Codex (2019); Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, Vols. I and II (2018); Chinese Medicinal Plants, Herbal Drugs and Substitutes (2017, reference/technical category) and Joseph Banks’ Florilegium (2017, consumer/popular category); Handbook of Essential Oils, 2nd edition (2016); Clinical Aromatherapy, 3rd edition (2015); Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge (2014); Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy, 2nd edition (2013); Medicinal Plants and the Legacy of Richard E. Schultes (2012, reference/technical category) and Smoke Signals (2012, consumer/popular category); and American Herbal Pharmacopoeia: Botanical Pharmacognosy (2011, reference/technical category) and Healing Spices (2011, consumer/popular category).