Richard Evans Schultes

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Richard Evans Schultes (SHULL-tees;<ref name=NYTobit>Jonathan Kandell, Richard E. Schultes, 86, Dies; Trailblazing Authority on Hallucinogenic Plants, The New York Times, April 13, 2001, Accessed April 26, 2020.</ref> 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.<ref>Review of the expanded edition</ref>

Early life and education

Schultes was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 12, 1915. The son of a plumber,<ref name=NYTobit/> he grew up and was educated in East Boston.<ref name=HarvardMemorium>Richard Evans Schultes: Memorial Minute, Harvard Gazette, September 18, 2003, Accessed March 11, 2015.</ref> 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.<ref name=NYTobit/> He received a full scholarship to Harvard.<ref name=NYTobit/>

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.<ref name=HarvardMemorium/> 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.<ref name=NYTobit/><ref name=HarvardMemorium/>

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.<ref name=NYTobit/> He received a fellowship from the National Research Council to study the plants used to make curare.<ref name=HarvardMemorium/>

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.<ref name=HarvardMemorium/>

"The ethnobotanical researcher...must realize that far from being a superior individual, he - the civilized man - is in many respects far inferior...."
— Richard Schultes reflecting on his experiences with indigenous peoples<ref name=HarvardMemorium/>

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.<ref name=NYTobit/> 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, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT).<ref name=VF>Tedd Mann, Magnificent Visions, Vanity Fair, December 2011, Accessed March 11, 2015.</ref> 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.<ref name=NYTobit/><ref name=HarvardMemorium/> He encountered dangers in his travels, including hunger, beriberi, repeated bouts of malaria, and near drowning.<ref name=HarvardMemorium/>

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 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). His composed and kindly persona and expressive eye gestures helped capture the imagination of the many students he inspired.

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.<ref name=NYTobit/> Schultes retired from Harvard in 1985.<ref name=NYTobit/> He was a member of King's Chapel church in Boston.<ref name=HarvardMemorium/> Despite his Germanic surname he was an anglophile.<ref name=HarvardMemorium/> He would often vote for the Queen of the United Kingdom during presidential elections because he didn't support the American Revolution.<ref name=LAT96>D. James Romero, The Father of Psychedelics? Just a Plant Guy, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1996, Accessed March 11, 2015.</ref>

Influences

Schultes was led to study psychoactive drugs by Heinrich Kluver, a leading scholar of this subject (personal communication from Schultes). This interest evolved by way of Schultes' field observations on peyote, studying the peyote cult among the Plains Indians in his travels with Weston LaBarre in the early 1930s (in 1938, LaBarre based The Peyote Cult on these travels and observations).

In Western culture, Schultes' discoveries influenced writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery, such as Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda.<ref name=NYTobit/><ref name="LAT96"/> Although he contributed to the psychedelic era with his discoveries, he personally disdained its proponents, dismissing drug guru and fellow Harvard professor Timothy Leary for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled the Latin names of the plants.<ref name=NYTobit/> When Burroughs described his ayahuasca visions as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Schultes famously replied, "That's funny, Bill, all I saw was colors."<ref name=NYTobit/><ref name=VF/><ref name=LAT96/>

Schultes' personal hero was Richard Spruce, a British naturalist who spent seventeen years exploring the Amazon rainforest.<ref name=NYTobit/>

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 Allen Ginsberg, ethnobotanist, conservationist and author Mark Plotkin, and authors Alejo Carpentier, Mary Mackey, and William S. Burroughs. Timothy Plowman, authority on the genus Erythroxylum (coca) and ethnobotanist, and Wade Davis were his students at Harvard.

Distinctions

Schultes received numerous awards and decorations including:

Schultes is one of the leading characters in the prestigious Colombian film El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent) (2015), directed by Ciro Guerra and critically acclaimed. The film depicts Schultes' search for a mysterious plant through the Amazon jungle, and he was played by actor Brionne Davis. The film specifically credits both his diaries and those accounts of an earlier Amazonian explorer, the German scientist Theodor Koch-Grünberg.

In 1962, botanist Harold E. Moore published Resia, which is a genus of flowering plants from South America, in the family Gesneriaceae and named in his honour.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Then in 1977, botanist Hunz. published Schultesianthus which is also a genus of flowering plants from South America, but belonging to the family Solanaceae and also named in Moore's honour.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Selected works

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See also

Notes

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