Long Read: How rediscovery of rare Rafflesia flower divided global scientific community

Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower, is rare. So rare that even experienced guides who take tourists on sightseeing expeditions of exotic plants in the jungles of Southeast Asia hardly ever see it bloom. 

So when Septian Andriki, an Indonesian guide in West Sumatra, saw the Rafflesia hasseltii species spreading its petals, he broke down into hysterical sobs. 

“Allah’O Akbar, Allah’O Akbar,” he could be heard crying in a video that Chris Thorogood, a British botanist, posted on his Instagram page in November 2025. 

Thorogood consoles Andriki. “It’s okay. We did it. We found it, my friend,” he says as he strokes Andriki’s head.  

Rafflesia has around 41 species, but it was the first time a hasseltii, which is named after a Dutch colonial botanist, was spotted in West Sumatra in more than a decade. 

Andriki, Thorogood and Joko Witono, a researcher at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), were part of a group taking plant samples when they came across the flower. 

A few days later, the University of Oxford reshared the same video on social media, announcing the sighting. It primarily focused on Thorogood and Oxford’s botanical gardens, where he works. It hailed the rediscovery and highlighted its novelty, saying that tigers come across the flower more often than humans. Andriki and Witono were not mentioned by name. 

That set off a firestorm. Indonesians criticised Oxford University’s handling of the news, saying it was reminiscent of colonial times, when British naturalists would claim to discover new flora, even though it was often the local guide who brought it to their attention.

It also triggered a wider debate over the amount of attention afforded to academics affiliated with Western institutions in scientific publications and international conferences, and how mainstream media portrays them as the leading experts in their field. 

“The reaction wasn’t really about a single social media post. It was about a pattern that many researchers in the Global South, and indigenous researchers in particular, have experienced repeatedly,” says June Mary Rubis, a conservation biologist and scholar who comes from the Bidayuh community in Malaysia. 

“Local researchers, field partners, and guides are often essential to discovery; they know where to look, how to read the landscape, how to move safely through it, but they are routinely framed as logistical support rather than intellectual contributors.” 

The history of Rafflesia is a microcosm of how European colonists exploited local resources and people for their own benefit. And it all started with an Indonesian guide just like Septian Andriki. 

“Come sir, a flower very large, beautiful’ 

Rafflesia is parasitic, which means it has no roots, stems or leaves. It attaches itself to the wine of a host plant and sucks its nutrients to survive. 

It has been the subject of numerous studies for over 200 years, yet the question of how Rafflesia, which is only found in the tropical forests of five Southeast Asian countries, propagates is up for debate.

Pictures of Rafflesia adorn the walls of many homes in the Philippines. It appears on stamps in Indonesia and currency notes in Malaysia. Tourists travel on foot for hours in the hope of catching a glimpse of this elusive flower, which blooms for five to seven days before decaying. Rafflesia has invaded even popular culture, most recently as Demogorgon in Netflix’s popular Stranger Things series. 

Rafflesia is called a corpse flower because it emits the smell of rotting meat, which attracts carrion flies and, as the theory goes, helps the flower pollinate and reproduce. (One biologist even captured the scent using a vacuum pump, and later lab tests showed that the chemical profile indeed resembled those of rotting meat.)

Rafflesia is also utterly useless with no proven medicinal benefits. 

Yet, it has fascinated the imagination of generations of botanists. 

Rafflesia was popularised in Europe  in 1818, when Joseph Arnold, a British surgeon working for the Royal Navy to collect new flora in Southeast Asia, saw a large flower during an expedition in Bengkulu. This is how Arnold described the encounter in a letter dated July 9, 1818. 

“I had ventured some way from the party, picking specimens of plants, when one of the Malay servants came running to me with wonderment in his eyes, and said… ‘come with me, Sir, come!, a flower very large, beautiful, wonderful!’.

History has forgotten the name of that Malay servant. But a year after that sighting, the flower was named Rafflesia arnoldi, after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and Arnold.

“Of course, the credit went to Raffles, the heroic white guy who loved to build his image,” says Timothy P. Barnard, associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore.  

Raffles worked for the British East India Company, which was at the forefront of collecting plants as part of its exploitation of colonies in Asia. He ultimately rose to become the British administrator of Singapore. 

“It was very important for them to try to cultivate various plants to see if they could make a profit, if the plants could be grown profitably in that port area or in that hinterland. So they would go out into the jungles and the forests to collect them,” says Barnard. 

“Now, of course, Rafflesia doesn't have any profitable uses, but it just gained their attention because of its unique nature.” 

When Barnard read the news articles about Septian Andriki’s sobbing over a Rafflesia hasseltii, he immediately saw a pattern. 

“The account of Western media of such events plays into a lot of tropes, like the exotica of the largest flower in the world. ‘Oh, it’s huge; it only lasts a few days, only tigers or panthers see it’.” 

In contrast to a wailing Andriki, Thorogood was presented as the all-knowing authority on Rafflesia who can be relied upon to explain its scientific nuance, he says. 

“They portray the Indonesian guy as being overly emotional and crying and, you know, it may be one of the few times the guy's even seen a Rafflesia. I've never seen one. I probably would cry too if I saw one,” says Barnard. 

In the 18th century, the East India Company and other colonial entities built botanical gardens that were housed with plants and herbaria collected by their employees on voyages to European colonies. 

As the size of the collections grew, English botanists adopted the Linnaean system of naming the plants with two Latin words, one describing the genus and the other the species. The system was developed by Swedish physician Carl Linneaus, who famously said, “God created, but Linnaeus organised”. The rest of the world caught on to the system, forgetting that plants and animals also have indigenous names.  Rafflesia is called Pakma, Padma, Ambai-ambai, and Bunga Bangkai, different names for Rafflesia in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. 

The Linnean Society of London, which was established in Linnean’s honour in 1788, has been at the forefront of promoting science. It was also the place where Chris Thorogood, the Oxford University botanist, spoke about his book on Rafflesia, Pathess Forest, in April, 2024. 

‘Like Apollo, he dared’ 

“Mr Chris, one day I show you big Rafflesia in Indonesia. Yes, Mr Chris visit Bengkulu Selatan and Muara Sahung – we see big flower there together. Big, big flower.”  This is the first chapter of the book, which chronicles Thorogood’s trips to the Philippines and Indonesia to study the flower. 

Thorogood is well-known among Rafflesia experts. He has authored at least 10 books on plants and dozens of research articles for science journals. He’s the founder of Community for the Conservation and Research of Rafflesia (CCRR), which boasts leading Indonesian and Filipino scientists as members. 

His books are as much about himself as they are about the science of plants. 

“Pathless Forest is the tale of a man who longed for something that made him uncharacteristically reckless and bold. Like Apollo, he dared, and he was driven to extremes by an unrequited love, in this case for a plant. And the harder he chased, the more he was rejected by that plant, and he was dragged to heaven through hell and back to find it and driven half mad in his obsession to do so. But so it was that I follow tribes down in the abyss to find Rafflesia’s hidden flowers and drip blood, sweat and tears on them,” he told the Linnean Society while talking about his book. 

Thorogood often posts pictures from the “abyss” to his 68,000 followers. He also makes hand-drawn illustrations of flowers and local guides. The 19th century colonial naturalists relied on illustrations of exotic plants and places to wow audiences back home. 

In Pathless Forest, Thorogood emphasises more than once that he was the “first foreigner” to travel to a far-flung forest of the Philippines. He mentions how a municipal official called him “Sir with emphasis on the ‘r’” and relates the tale of the person in charge of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources who thought the University of Oxford Botanic Garden was in the US. His description of places he visits in Southeast Asia is vivid: “Two men peeing - each with one hand on the wall”.

Thorogood didn’t reply to TRT World’s request for an interview. 

One person mentioned repeatedly in Thorogood’s book is Adriane Tobias, who is described as a “guide” in the Philippines’ Los Banos region. 

Tobias tells TRT World he is not a guide but a botanist, just like Thorogood, and that he documents and studies plants in the wild. 

The two first met in 2019 when Tobias was in the UK for a conference. Thorogood’s subsequent travel to the Philippines rainforest, where Tobias worked alongside him, was a result of an agreement between the University of Oxford and the University of the Philippines Los Baños. 

“It was not something like ‘come to the Philippines and let’s visit Rafflesia.’ It was more like, ‘come here and we can do collaborative research together’,” he says.

After the controversy surfaced, Tobias wrote an essay titled ‘On Credit, Representation and the True Guardians of Rafflesia’ in which he argued that local communities have passed on the knowledge about the flower across generations in the shape of stories and culture, even if it’s not always written down. 

“Plants like Rafflesia are not 'discoveries' for them; they are long-familiar forest relatives. What is new is the sudden external fascination, and unfortunately, the recurring pattern where outsiders claim ownership of narratives that were never theirs to begin with.”

But the Western media continues to glorify its own scientists. 

“This is how parachute science persists: not only through research practices, but through storytelling that centers the wrong protagonists,” he writes in the essay that he shared with TRT World. 

This wasn’t the first time Oxford had disappointed Thorogood’s peer in Southeast Asia. 

In September 2023, a multinational study on the extinction threat facing Rafflesia came out. Thorogood was among the ten experts who contributed to the paper. Most of the fieldwork was done by local researchers in Southeast Asia. 

But in a press release announcing the publication of the paper, Oxford University put the spotlight on Thorogood, featuring his picture prominently alongside a Rafflesia, while referring to all the other contributors simply as “an international group of scientists”. 

When The Guardian covered the story,  it quoted ‘Dr Chris Thorogood’ as an author of the study. Tobias was also quoted, but only as a ‘forester from the Philippines’. The news article didn’t say Tobias was one of the lead authors who had done the bulk of the work. 

University of Singapore’s Timothy Barnard says Thorogood gets all the attention because he’s white and represents a Western institution. 

“I’m sure he has a good heart. I’m sure he’s an excellent researcher and has tremendous knowledge,” he says. “I’m sure he wants to believe and thinks his Indonesian counterparts and colleagues are co-researchers on this material, but when it gets to the media, all of it becomes about the white guy.”

For years, scientists from developing countries have called for a change in such attitudes. One of the most vocal voices has risen from the forests of Colombia. 

The colonial legacy lives on 

A few weeks before the Rafflesia haseltii controversy surfaced, Dolors Armenteras, a Colombian biodiversity professor, wrote a scathing article titled Equity in Science is a Beautiful Lie in the Nature journal. It was an outburst fueled by years of frustration over her being sidelined by peers from richer countries. 

“We get very little funding. Whatever we get comes from overseas. These big guys come and want to help collect data, and then they leave. They don’t build capacity. They just want information and want you to pick them up from the airport,” she tells TRT World. 

Armenteras was born and raised in Spain, but for the past 27 years, she has lived and worked in the Latin American country, helping map the forests and supervising local PhD students. 

In her long career, Armenteras says she experienced discrimination firsthand. Once at an international conference, she was told the only reason she was invited was that she fit the profile of someone from Latin America. She has seen academics from rich countries being given the podium to speak about their work while she was ignored. 

A Swiss institution asked her to summarise 25 years of her work on deforestation in a two-hour interview so it can advise the Colombian government. 

“They were probably making a lot of money from that study but were not willing to pay me anything,” she says. 

Funding for research remains concentrated with universities in rich countries, multiple research reports have shown. 

This invariably translates into higher output in scientific articles. One survey showed that the Global South contributed only 16 percent of the published articles, whereas 73 percent came from the Global North. 

The disparity is not only in funds. No matter how important their research outcome is, scientists from developing countries try to seek approval from Western institutions. 

“It’s not simply about money, but about where legitimacy is produced. Research infrastructure, journals, grants, and even citation networks are still overwhelmingly anchored in the Global North,” says Rubis, the Bidayuh scholar.

“This creates a situation where scholars in the Global South are often structurally incentivised to align themselves with Western institutions in order to be seen as credible, even when the research is rooted locally.” 

A few days after the Rafflesia haseltii controversy, the University of Oxford released a longer statement declaring Andriki a “local conservation hero” and naming Witono. It also acknowledged the contribution of Agus Susatya, a professor of tropical plant ecology at the University of Bengkulu, to the research. 

Susustya, who has helped identify three Refflesia species, says the whole haseltii episode was blown out of proportion by social media and unnecessarily politicised. 

“Basically, there was drama. That same haseltii at the centre of it was spotted in Bengkulu in 2023 and 2024. Actually, there’s nothing special about the flowering of this species. It is remotely seen because of the remoteness where it is found.” 

Like other Rafflesia experts that TRT World spoke to, Susustya had known and collaborated with Thorogood for years. “Chris Thorogood is my good friend. He has been to Bengkulu several times, and we have discussed researching Refflesia DNA.” 

Another expert who vouches for Thorogood is Jeanmarie Molina, a Filipinian plant evolutionary biologist at Pace University. 

Molina spearheaded a seminal study that found the missing gene, because of which Rafflesia has lost its ability to photosynthesise. 

“After the online controversy emerged, I spoke with Chris directly. He was genuinely distressed by how events unfolded, as the portrayal of him on social media does not reflect the scientist I know or his longstanding commitment to collaboration and conservation,” she tells TRT World.

Sustained international collaboration and external funding are important Rafflesia conservation efforts, she says. 

“Being institutionally based in the US has given me access to funding and infrastructure that would have been difficult to obtain otherwise—such as the US National Science Foundation support and long-term collaboration with the US Botanic Garden in Washington, DC.” 

At the same time, Molina says she also believes that inequality persists in the world of science, even if she has not experienced it firsthand. 

“I have seen instances in which Southeast Asian scientists defer visibility and leadership to foreign collaborators, at times restricting opportunities for local researchers to present or lead. This reflects a continuing colonial mentality that shapes who is recognised as authoritative in collaborative research.”

Both Molina and Sustaya are part of the Community for the Conservation and Research of Rafflesia that Thorogood founded.

While the Rafflesia haselltii controversy has put the spotlight on how the West continues to dominate science, it remains unclear how far academics and scientists from the Global South will go to reclaim their rightful share.

After years of trying, in 2010, an Indonesian botanist Sofi Mursidawati, successfully cultivated three Rafflesia at Bogor Botanical Gardens away from its natural habitat in the jungle. That was the first time Rafflesia had been grown in a controlled environment, and it was a major leap in effort to protect the flower from extinction. 

Of the three Rafflesia, two were female. Mursidawati named them Margaret and Elizabeth after the British Royal Family.