Week 6, Chapter 13 -- Digging Deeper Course home | Weekly schedule | Announcements | Instructor Info | Desire2Learn | MasteringBiology® | Honor Code | FAQs | HELP!

Instructions:

Part 1:

Suppose you are a biologist working for a pharmaceutical company. Your boss has asked you to find plants that might be useful for medical research. You know that indigenous people can be a good source of information about medicinal plants, so you selected an area to visit, met with knowledgeable local people, and then selected four plants that seemed most promising. Now you need to write a report to your boss, explaining the following:

1. Where did you decide to go, and why did you decide to go there?
2. Which four plant species did you select? Include both the common name (if any) and the scientific name; the scientific name should always be in italics. You can also include photos if you like (but be sure that you cite the source of each). What are the potential medicinal benefits? Have any of the potential uses been supported with scientific research? (One way to find out is to type the plant's scientific name into an online medical research database such as PubMed.)
3. Convince your boss that your choice of plants is good for both the company and for the indigenous economy.
4. Do you plan to recommend to your boss that your indigenous guides be compensated for their help? If so, in what way do you recommend they be compensated? If not, why do you believe they do not deserve to be compensated?

Your assignment should be at least 450 words long; you can see a sample assignment here.

The Internet contains abundant resources related to this topic -- you might try searching for the terms "ethnobotany" or "Mark Plotkin." To get you started, here are some sites that might be helpful:

• Raintree Nutrition; you may find it helpful to click on Ethnic Uses or Actions
• Native American Ethnobotany at University of Michigan, Dearborn; powerful database, but you need to know what you are looking for
• Traditional Herbal & Plant Knowledge
• Centre for International Ethnomedicinal Education and Research
• People and Plants International
• Halkomelem Ethnobiology Web Site; hover your mouse over the Ethnobiology/Linguistics link at the bottom of the page to learn about the plants and animals that the Halkomelem people use
• Ethnobotanical Leaflets at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale might be a useful source. It has a lot of neat information if you browse around, but the site isn't searchable, so you have to just look around.

Remember, cutting and pasting from another website, without quotes or citation, is PLAGIARISM -- so is using a cut-and-pasted passage and just changing a few words. Plagiarism is a serious form of academic misconduct. If you have any questions about whether your work constitutes plagiarism, please visit the resources at week 1's plagiarism assignment, or ask your instructor.

[Note: this assignment was adapted from the following website: http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/plotkin.html]

Part 2:

Use D2L's spell checker (or the one on your word processor software, which will give you a word count as well). Proofread it yourself too, because spell checkers don't catch everything. When you are satisfied, post your completed assignment in the Digging Deeper forum for this week at the D2L discussion board.

Part 3:

Respond to the Digging Deeper posts of at least two other students. (If you are the first or second person to post, you will have to check back later to complete this part of the assignment).

• Just as you spell checked and proofread your original post, you should do the same for your responses.
• Please respond to posts with 0 responses first; once every post has at least one response, you are free to choose any post to respond to.
• When you respond, please use the name of the student you are responding to. That is, say "Hi Trudy" or "Hi Paul" so that you can get used to the names of the people in class. (You can find a list of "real" names and preferred names at D2L).
• In your response, be sure you mention something specific that the writer did well. Also, specifically address anything you find that seems incorrect to you (phrased in a constructive way -- use the same language you would want someone else to use in telling you something you did wrong). I don't mean spelling errors and typographical errors. I mean more substantive comments. You may wish to argue with (or critique) what the student wrote, request supporting evidence, evaluate the student's argument, add new information, make a factual correction, or explain why you agree. Check out this page for more on the topic of good and bad responses.

After you have posted your assignment AND responded to two other students, go to Desire2Learn and complete the Gradebook Declaration for this week's Digging Deeper assignment. (Your Gradebook Declaration is subject to the Honor Code.)

Contemporary Issues in Biology -- BIOL 1003 Mariëlle H. Hoefnagels, Ph.D. © 2004-2015. biology1003 at OU dot edu (at = @, dot =.) Last Updated August 5, 2014 11:02 PM