Richard Evans Schultes (Jan 12, 1915 - April 10, 2001) was the sort of character Hollywood hasn't the imagination to invent. Although certainly one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, few have heard of him. This didn't bother him. His idea of a good time involved being very far away from those who might recognize him - among people who had seen few, if any, white men at all.
"I do not believe in hostile Indians," Dr. Schultes was quoted as saying in a 1992 article. "All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness."
He was often called the father of ethnobotany, which is the study of the relationship between native cultures and their use of plants. Over decades of research, mainly in Colombia's Amazon region, he documented the use of more than 2,000 medicinal plants among Indians of a dozen tribes; his visit often being their first contact with outsiders. He was widely considered the preeminent authority on hallucinogenic and medicinal plants (One of the many students Schultes inspired to take a more holistic, cross-cultural approach to medicine was Andrew Weil, whom many consider one of the founders of "complementary medicine" in the U.S.).
As a young student at Harvard in the 1930s, Schultes wrote an undergraduate paper on the mind-altering properties of peyote, based on research he undertook with Kiowa Indians in Oklahoma who ingested the hallucinogen in ceremonies to commune with their ancestors. He later wrote that this experience was the birth of his whole career. For his doctoral thesis, also at Harvard, he chose the plants used by the Indians of Oaxaca, a southern state of Mexico. In his research there, he came across a species of morning glory seeds that contained a molecule very similar to LSD.
Dr. Schultes's research into plants (like peyote and ayahuasca) that produced hallucinogens made some of his books very popular among drug experimenters in the 1960's. By the time altered states of consciousness became "fashionable" in the 60's, Schultes had been studying hallucinogenic plants for 30 years. He had never encountered the use of hallucinogens outside of a cultural milieu in which these substances were revered and respected. The importance of the connection of the plants' properties with the spiritual and mythic lives of the people who used them was obvious to him. Thus, he was dismissive of Timothy Leary and others who seemed to think that hallucinogens offered an instant cure to the problems of Western society or that they could be used "recreationally" — divorced from the respect and spiritual status native people universally held for them.
Schultes' interest in hallucinogens sprang from the same altruistic roots as his interest in the healing power of plants for all of the ills that afflict humanity. He had seen the role that such plants played in the spiritual and cultural life of the peoples he lived with, worked with, and loved. Perhaps he had an intuition that hallucinogenic plants, used in the proper way, could do much to heal the spiritual ills of our own confused civilization. His job, as he saw it, was to document these "proper" uses and preserve this knowledge, until such time as a more humane, open-minded culture could appreciate them, and perhaps even use them wisely.
In a short piece like this, it's impossible to do more than suggest the wonders of this man's life. If you'd like to know more, I highly recommend One River, by Wade Davis. Davis is an excellent writer, and was a student and friend of Schultes'. The book is exciting, moving, and fascinating.
Touching memories of Schultes by German Zuluaga, M.D. - written in Spanish by a Columbian doctor who knew him: http://www.ethnobotany.org/actnew/news-schultes-esp.html
