José Cuatrecasas
(Camprodon, Girona, 1903 - Washington D. C., 1996)

José Cuatrecasas Arumí (or Josep Cuatrecasas i Arumí in Catalan), was a prominent figure of the heyday of scientific research in Spain, carried on with the support from the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE) before the Civil War. This research enterprise was abruptly interrupted at the end of the war, when many of the best scientists went into exile and tried to continue their work abroad.  Cuatrecasas was a scientist who, like others of his generation, such as zoologist Cándido Bolívar and geologist José Royo, was deeply involved in public life, especially during the difficult years of the war.

He studied pharmacy in Barcelona with the great botanist Pius Font i Quer. Cuatrecasas built one of the most extensive and fruitful careers ever developed by a Spanish botanist. He catalogued over a thousand new species and published 250 works.

An intriguing aspect of his modern approach to botanical research was his interest on ecology, influenced by his mentors Font i Quer, Carlos Pau, and Emilio Huguet del Villar, who introduced the study of ecology in Spain. Cuatrecasas’ Ph.D. dissertation (1928) “Estudios sobre la flora y la vegetación del macizo de Mágina,” combined this dual approach to flora and ecology. He also pioneered the study of the tropical flora in Spain after his research in European botanic centers with grants from the JAE.

At the end of 1931, he won the chair of botany at the Faculty of Pharmacy in Madrid. Ignacio Bolívar immediately noted Cuatrecasas’ talents and supported his appointment by the JAE as head of the newly created Tropical Plants section in Madrid Botanical Garden, in 1933.
His move to Madrid did not end the relationship with his mentors in Catalonia.  He served as secretary of Cavanillesia, the first botanical periodical published in Spain, from 1928 to1938, the dates of its publication. Font i Quer was editor-in-chief, and Carlos Pau was its director. 

He realized his wish to further his knowledge of tropical botany when he was invited as delegate to the events to commemorate the 200th anniversary of José Celestino Mutis in Colombia in 1932. He took advantage of that trip and conducted research on the botany and the environment in a country that was to remain close to him for the rest of his life. He reassumed the scientific enterprise that Mutis had begun two centuries earlier, and whose results were kept in Madrid.  Cuatrecasas’ work in the Garden was precisely the cataloguing of Mutis’ rich legacy and its study.

He worked for the survival the JAE during the Civil War and was appointed director of the Botanical Garden in 1937. Cuatrecasas managed to include Mutis’ botanical drawings among the beleaguered artistic treasure, such as the paintings of the Prado in Madrid. He was a supporter of Azaña and his party, Izquierda Republicana, and served as a pharmacist in the Ministry of Health, headed by the anarchist Federica Montseny.
        
He went into exile to Colombia in 1939 and reassumed the research that he had begun in 1932 in Bogotá and Cali. His final destination was, however, the United States. In 1947, he moved to the Natural History Museum in Chicago, and to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D. C. in 1955. He promoted, with the support of UNESCO, “Flora Neotropica," a project to coordinate the publication of monographs on plants of tropical America. The spectacular specimens of the Espeletia, a genus of perennial sub shrubs endemic in the high Andean plateau that had called his attention during his first trip in 1932, became the main object of his scientific work, a task that he continued almost to his death, at the age of 93.