Janice Hatteberg, age 12, of Fonda, Iowa, for her question:

What plant gives quinine?

Not so long ago, quinine was the only medicine known for treating the high fever disease of malaria. The medicine was made from the bark of the cinchona tree, a native of South America. The Spaniards discovered quinine in Peru in the year 1640. The medicine was in such demand in other malarial regions of the world that the cinchona trees of South America were stripped without mercy.

In the 1850'x, the Dutch started cultivation of the tree in Java and, 100 years later, most of the world's quinine was coming from the East Indies. In the 1940'x, however, the chemists learned to create the medicine artificially. Nowadays, most of the quinine used to treat malaria and high fevers is man‑made.