Richard Evans Schultes Totally Explained

Everything about Richard E Schultes totally explained

Richard Evans Schultes (January 12, 1915 – April 10, 2001) may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany:

for his studies of Indigenous peoples' (especially Indigenous peoples of the Americas) uses of plants, including especially entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants (particularly in Mexico and the Amazon);

for his lifelong collaborations with chemists,

for his charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University on a number of students and colleagues who went on to write popular books and assume influential positions in museums, botanical gardens, and popular culture. His book "The Plants of the Gods" - coauthored with chemist Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD - is considered his greatest popular work.

Biography

A Harvard student himself from 1934 to 1941, Schultes studied with Oakes Ames, orchidologist and director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, who influenced his student research with the ritual use of peyote cactus among the Kiowa of Oklahoma, as well as his discovery of the lost identity of the Mexican hallucinogenic plants teonanácatl (various mushrooms belonging to the Psilocybe genus) and ololiuqui (a morning glory species) in Oaxaca, Mexico.
   The first of many prolonged trips to the Upper Amazon began in 1941 as a Harvard research associate, and included a search for wild disease-resistant rubber species in an effort to free the United States from dependence on Southeast Asian rubber plantations which had become unavailable due to Japanese occupation in World War II. The effort to create blight resistant rubber plantations in Central and South America was eventually terminated for political reasons despite protests from rubber companies, including Firestone. No remaining rubber trees collected by Schultes are being cultivated for the production of rubber.
   Schultes' botanical fieldwork among Native American communities led him to be one of the first to alert the world about destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the disappearance of its native people. He collected over 30,000 herbarium specimens (including 300 species new to science) and published numerous ethnobotanical discoveries including the source of the dart poison known as curare, now commonly employed as a muscle relaxant during surgery.
   Schultes became curator of Harvard's Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium in 1953, curator of economic botany in 1958, and professor of biology in 1970. His ever-popular undergraduate course on Economic Botany was noted for his Victorian demeanor, lectures delivered while wearing a white lab coat, insistence on memorization of systematic botanical names, films depicting native ritual use of plant inebriants, blow pipe demonstrations, and hands-on labs (plant sources of grain, paper, caffeine, dyes, medicines, tropical fruits). His composed and kindly persona combined with expressive eye gestures masked his exotic experience and helped capture the imagination of the many students he inspired.

Influences

Schultes' personal "hero" was Richard Spruce, a naturalist who spent 17 years exploring the Amazon rainforest.
Schultes, in both his life and his work, has directly influenced notable people as diverse as biologist E.O. Wilson, physician Andrew Weil, psychologist Daniel Goleman, poet Alan Ginsberg, and authors Alejo Carpentier and William S. Burroughs. Tim Plowman, authority on the genus Erythroxylem (coca) and explorer-author Wade Davis were his students at Harvard.

Distinctions

Schultes received numerous awards and decorations including:

Gold Medal from the Linnean Society of London (1992), the most prestigious prize in botany;

Gold Medal from the World Wildlife Fund, considered by some to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Conservation.

Selected works

Quotations

"You are not going back to the States, you're going right down into the Amazon and try to get the Indians to tap wild rubber. The Japanese have taken over all of Southeast Asia -- we've no more rubber, which is essential, especially for the heavy military planes."

"You have a feeling of achievement when you discover a new plant, even a plant that has no use."

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