Guam Disease

In the later part of her professional career, Dr. Whiting studied the neurotoxic effects on Guamanians of eating the fermented seed pod of the cycad plant. After her death, Dr. Whiting’s personal library, including unpublished records of her groundbreaking research in Guam, became the property of the Marjorie Grant Whiting Center for Humanity, Arts and the Environment.

Discussions in 2002 with James Cartright, Special Collections Librarian for the Hamilton Library of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, resulted in a decision to donate Marjorie Grant Whiting’s professional papers, photographs and other documents, including those related to the neurotoxicity of cycads, to the University of Hawaii, an institution with which she was affiliated for more than a decade. Through the University of Hawaii Library, Dr. Whiting’s papers are now accessible to the scientific community and will are being catalogued to facilitate their use.

The MGW Center has made annual contributions to the University of Hawaii Library to help defray the costs of cataloguing Dr. Whiting’s papers. The decision to preserve her personal library and make it accessible supports the Center’s mission to enable other scientists to build upon Dr. Whiting’s ethnobotanical research on the neurotoxicity of cycads as well as to make her historical collection of papers on the cultural aspects of foods available to scholars world-wide. These papers can be accessed at http://libweb.hawaii.edu/libdept/archives/mss/whiting/index.htm.

A bibliography listing the publications of Marjorie Grant Whiting can be accessed at in the References section of this site.