Richard Evans Schultes (SHULL-tees; January 12, 1915 – April 10, 2001) was an American biologist, considered to be the father of modern ethnobotany. He is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He worked on entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants, particularly in Mexico and the Amazon, involving lifelong collaborations with chemists. He had charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University; several of his students and colleagues went on to write popular books and assume influential positions in museums, botanical gardens, and popular culture. His book The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (1979), co-authored with chemist Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, is considered his greatest popular work: it has never been out of print and was revised into an expanded second edition, based on a German translation by Christian Rätsch (1998), in 2001.
Early life and education Schultes was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 12, 1915. The son of a plumber, he grew up and was educated in East Boston. His interest in South America's rain forests traced back to his childhood: while he was bedridden, his parents read him excerpts of Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes, by the 19th-century English botanist Richard Spruce. He received a full scholarship to Harvard. In 1933, Schultes entered Harvard University, where he planned to pursue medicine. However, that changed after he took Biology 104, "Plants and Human Affairs," taught by orchidologist and Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum Oakes Ames, and after reading Heinrich Klüver's 1928 book Mescal: The 'Divine' Plant and Its Psychological Effects. Ames became a mentor, and Schultes became an assistant in the Botanical Museum; his undergraduate senior thesis studied the ritual use of peyote cactus among the Kiowa of Oklahoma, obtaining a degree in biology in 1937. Continuing at Harvard under Ames, he completed his Master of Arts in biology in 1938 and his Ph.D. in botany in 1941. Schultes' doctoral thesis investigated the lost identity of the Mexican hallucinogenic plants teonanácatl mushrooms belonging to the genus Psilocybe, and ololiuqui, a morning glory species, in Oaxaca, Mexico. He received a fellowship from the National Research Council to study the plants used to make curare.
Career The entry of the United States into World War II in 1941 saw Schultes diverted to the search for wild disease-resistant Hevea rubber species in an effort to free the U.S. from dependence on Southeast Asia's rubber plantations which had become unavailable owing to Japanese occupation. In early 1942, as a field agent for the governmental Rubber Development Corporation, Schultes began work on rubber and concurrently undertook research on Amazonian ethnobotany, under a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Schultes' botanical field-work among aboriginal American communities led him to be one of the first to alert the world about destruction of the Amazon rain-forest and the disappearance of its native people. He collected over thirty thousand herbarium specimens (including three hundred species new to Western 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. He was the first non-native individual to academically examine ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made out of Banisteriopsis caapi vine in combination with various plants; of which he identified Psychotria viridis (Chacruna) and Diplopterys cabrerana (Chaliponga), both of which contained a potent short-acting hallucinogen, dimethyltryptamine (DMT). In his travels he lived with the indigenous peoples and viewed them with respect and felt that tribal chiefs were gentlemen; he understood the languages of the Witoto and Makuna peoples. He encountered dangers in his travels, including hunger, beriberi, repeated bouts of malaria, and near drowning. 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 undergraduate course on economic botany was noted for his Victorian demeanor, lectures delivered in a white lab coat, insistence on memorization of systematic botanical names, films depicting native ritual use of plant inebriants, blowgun demonstrations, and hands-on labs (using plant sources of grain, paper, caffeine, dyes, medicines, and tropical fruits). Schultes was a captivating raconteur and would entertain his undergraduate students with stories of his adventures; in one such narrative he explains that even though he is physically in Cambridge, Massachusetts, legally speaking and according to his passport he is still in Bolivia, as having entered that country through the normal immigration process, he had to make an emergency exit from that country's Amazon jungle and enter neighboring Brazil to escape bandits who were pursuing him. In 1959, Schultes married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, an opera soprano who performed in Europe and the United States. They had three children, Richard Evans Schultes II, and twins Alexandra Ames Schultes Wilson and Neil Parker Schultes. Schultes retired from Harvard in 1985. He was a member of King's Chapel church in Boston. Despite his Germanic surname he was an anglophile. He would often vote for the Queen of the United Kingdom during presidential elections because he didn't support the American Revolution.
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