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 “Carver was driven by the needs he saw around him,” says Michael Dillon, chair of the Botany Department at The Field Museum and one of the curators for the Carver exhibition. “His research was very goal oriented.”
As a scientist, George Washington Carver’s innovation was to use chemistry to take plants apart and put them back together again as something new. His mission was to create products from plant sources and show the world the economic potential of alternative crops.
But creating new uses from plant materials is not a new idea. Cultures have always relied on plants to make food, medicine, housing materials, and a wide variety of products. The study of how people of a particular culture or region make use of local plants is called “Economic Botany.”
 Economic Botany at The Field Museum
Ever since its founding in the late 19th century, The Field Museum and its scientists have studied the great variety of ways that people use plants.
In fact, The Field Museum has one of the largest and most comprehensive Economic Botany collections in the world. These collections contain over 14,000 objects, the first of which were displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
To learn more about these collections, check out Economic Botany at The Field Museum.
Or, continue to A Field Museum Economic Botanist. >>
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