Maynard Ward Quimby

Maynard Ward Quimby
Born	1905
Nationality	American
Occupation	Pharmacognosist and botanist
Institutions	Massachusetts College of Pharmacy; University of Mississippi
Known for	The University of Mississippi's medicinal plant garden; herbarium sheets of its cannabis plantings, 1968–1971
Collector name on accessions	M.W. Quimby

Maynard Ward Quimby (born 1905) was an American pharmacognosist who taught at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston and, from 1967, at the University of Mississippi. At Mississippi he helped develop the College of Pharmacy's garden of economic plants and its marijuana research project, which grew Cannabis sativa from 1968 under a federal contract to supply standardised marijuana to researchers. Herbarium sheets that he gathered from the university's cannabis plantings between September 1968 and November 1971 are held at the Harvard University Herbaria. In 1976 the university renamed its research garden the Maynard W. Quimby Medicinal Plant Garden.

Boston and the study of drug plants

Quimby took a master's degree at Cornell University in 1934 and a PhD there in 1939. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston, where he became professor of pharmacognosy and botany and worked for many years with Heber Youngken Sr. He studied both the botany and the chemistry of medicinal plants. His interest in ethnobotany took him on collecting trips, among them at least one to North Africa. In 1964 he and Georgia Persinos published notes on a preliminary drug-hunting trip to the Jos Plateau in Nigeria. From 1948 to 1955 he edited The Mask, the journal of the Kappa Psi pharmaceutical fraternity.

The Mississippi garden

Norman Doorenbos, who created the university's Department of Pharmacognosy, recruited Quimby to it. The department's plant garden went back to 1965, when Doorenbos began to study the chemistry of some native plants. Quimby expanded it after he arrived in 1967. In 1968 the National Institute of Mental Health offered a contract to supply standardised marijuana to researchers. Doorenbos won it for the university. The first experimental plot was grown that year, and a secured garden was built in 1969. The American Society of Pharmacognosy calls Quimby a major force in developing the garden of economic plants, its greenhouses and the Marijuana Research Project.

His specialty at the university was the botany of cannabis and of other medicinal plants. He was a co-author of the project's early papers. One, a report of 1971 by P. S. Fetterman and others, described nine strains grown by the university from seed obtained from Iowa, Minnesota, Mexico, Turkey, Italy, France and Sweden. Another, led by Doorenbos the same year, dealt with the cultivation, extraction and analysis of the crop. In 1973 he was the first author, with Doorenbos, Carlton E. Turner and Asaad Masoud, of a paper in Economic Botany on the cultivation of Mississippi-grown marihuana and the variation in form seen among the plants.

Anthony Haden-Guest, who visited the garden for High Times in 1976, wrote that Quimby kept his own plot, a small allotment in the middle of the garden, where the professor grew unusual kinds of cannabis. Turner, the project's director, told him that he did not want those plants in his catalogue: they were only herbarium specimens, and he needed consistency.^: 62–63

Cannabis specimens

Quimby's sheets passed from the herbarium of the Department of Pharmacognosy of the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy to the Economic Botany Herbarium (ECON) at Harvard. Their labels place the plants on university property in Lafayette County, grown in silt-like soil (loess). A sheet of 12 September 1968 is coded DZ. Its label reads Seed source: Turkish??. Codes of a later MS-S series name their seed. MS-SPP is Turkish 1967, small sample supplied by Dr. Stig Agurel. MS-SO is Thailand Marihuana Seed, 1-17-70. In October and November 1971 he gathered plants coded af-b and af-c17, whose labels read Afghanistan - seed source. Ernest Small determined the sheets in February 1976, some as Cannabis sativa and others as C. sativa subsp. indica.

Richard Evans Schultes, Timothy Plowman and Tom Lockwood collected sheets in the garden on 31 July and 1 August 1972. In their 1976 revision of the genus, Small and Arthur Cronquist cited those sheets by the seed lot's Quimby acquisition code, such as T A for a Turkish lot and Af A for an Afghan one. They thanked Quimby, Turner and their associates for counsel about their experimental studies in Cannabis.^{: 423, 428, 431}

Accessions collected by Quimby:

	Country	Grown	Repository	Catalogue number
UMS-AFG-UNK-0019710001	Afghanistan	21 October 1971	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 00947793, ECON 00947797
UMS-AFG-UNK-0019710002	Afghanistan	4 November 1971	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 00947794
UMS-THA-UNK-0019690001	Thailand	11 October 1969	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005561
UMS-THA-UNK-0019700001	Thailand	1970	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005564, ECON 01005560, ECON 01005565, ECON 01005562
UMS-THA-UNK-0019710001	Thailand	14 October 1971	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005563
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019700001	Turkey		Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005300, ECON 01005427, ECON 01005301
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019700002	Turkey		Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005298, ECON 01005428
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019700003	Turkey		Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005297, ECON 01005307, ECON 01005302, ECON 01005304, ECON 01005425, ECON 01005426
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019700004	Turkey	7 July 1970	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005299, ECON 01005293
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019710001	Turkey	24 August 1971	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005305
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019710002	Turkey	23 August 1971	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005303, ECON 01005306
UMS-TUR-UNK-0019710003	Turkey	24 August 1971	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005430
UMS-VNM-UNK-0019700001	Vietnam	19 October 1970	Harvard University Herbaria	ECON 01005559, ECON 01005566

Later years

Quimby retired in 1972 and stayed active at the university for several years afterwards. He was the eighth president of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, in the late 1960s. In 1972–73 he was president of the Society for Economic Botany. He was also made a fellow of the American Pharmaceutical Association. The society names David Carew and Norman Farnsworth among the pharmacognosists who could trace their roots in the discipline to him.

In 2013 the university moved the Quimby garden to a new five-acre site to make way for its Insight Park research park. The new buildings were dedicated in April. A bronze bust of Quimby was put on display in the lobby of the garden's laboratory building. He had died by then: the university's announcement of the dedication called him the late Maynard W. Quimby.

See also

• Norman John Doorenbos
• Richard Evans Schultes
• University of Mississippi