“I'm beautiful in my way

'Cause God makes no mistakes

I'm on the right track, baby

I was born this way”

Lady Gaga couldn’t have said it any better. Yes, Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower is a freak of nature. It is a plant unlike any other—a non-photosynthetic parasite siphoning nutrients from a tropical vine. It has no roots, stems or leaves, just a massive red-orange flower, a spectacle so seldom in the midst of the rainforest, that tourists pay to see it, in spite of a permeating stench that lures in carrion flies to unwittingly carry its sticky pollen. Hence, the common name, corpse flower.

Click on this link to see flies pollinating the corpse flower

My name is Jeanmaire Molina, a college professor at Long Island University (LIU). I am a Filipino scientist with a dream, and that is to understand Rafflesia’s biology better so that we can grow it and save it from extinction due to rainforest destruction (Barcelona et al. 2009).  So that my son’s grandchildren and yours could also have the pleasure of being mesmerized by it, in the same way the pandas and the tigers are adored and admired. But unlike pandas and tigers, Rafflesia, despite many attempts, has not been grown out of the wild. And my life’s mission as a scientist is to make this happen.

Click here to learn more about me

Your trust in me is important. Click here for my qualifications as a scientist

How do the seeds get into its host plant? What makes the seeds germinate and thrive in its host? How can we replicate the process in artificial environment so that botanic gardens can grow it and conserve it ex situ?

To answer these questions, I will be traveling to the Philippines, the hub of Rafflesia diversity, home to more than 10 Rafflesia species. Your donations will be used to fund 2 weeks of fieldwork including travel costs, costs for field supplies, wages for field assistants, as well as cost of reagents for relevant lab experiments. If I reach my campaign goal by the deadline, I will conduct the field work this August, secure the necessary collecting and export permits to collect plant material, and continue with relevant lab work at LIU in September. If I don't reach my campaign goal, your contribution is NOT in vain. I plan to deposit collected funds in a bank account, and all donors will receive monthly statement updates of the balance, until I can find supplementary funding to pursue the field and lab work next field season (summer 2015).

I ask for NO money for my own personal efforts. The experience of learning about Rafflesia is a reward in itself. As a donor, you will receive regular updates of my results, cool Rafflesia photos from my field work, and you will be fully acknowledged  in research publications from this project. Plus, you get that priceless sense of fulfillment for helping a good cause.

You’d say it is a parasite, so why save it. It is an innocuous parasite, at least from an economic standpoint, unlike the destructive crop-killing witchweeds of Africa and Asia; it only grows on Tetrastigma, an ordinary impractical forest vine, which superficially does not seem to mind its flamboyant parasitic partner. Theirs is an ancient fragile partnership wrought by millions of years of careful evolution.

From a biological perspective, Rafflesia is simply an evolutionary marvel. There is no plant quite like it—a giant, fetid, parasitic, fly-pollinated flower—and this is all part of its charisma. On top of that, it has redefined what we know about plants. The chloroplast genome, the set of genes for making plants green and photosynthetic, is believed to be universal in all plants—until we couldn’t find it in Rafflesia (Molina et al. 2014) . So unusual was this that one scientific writer had to ask, “When is a plant no longer a plant?"(Pennisi 2014;Yong 2014) Of course, Rafflesia is still very much a plant. For one, it has a flower.

Indeed Rafflesia is a freak of nature. As Lady Gaga would say, “born this way”, yet beautiful in its own right.  Please help me in my scientific quest to study and save Rafflesia from extinction. Because once gone, ironically, we can no longer exhume the corpse flower.