Biographical Memoirs Volume 88 (2006) / Chapter Skim
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Richard Evans Schultes
Richard Evans Schultes
Pages 338-351
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From page 339... ...
He spoke softly, with a clipped Boston accent, and peered at the students behind wirerimmed glasses while he explained in a bemused tone the advantages of the use of snuff as a means to clear a stuffy nose. A highly conservative, proper Bostonian no doubt and about to deliver what we expected would be a scholarly, probably dull lecture on the taxonomy of some plant family.
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From page 340... ...
As the inheritor of a grand tradition, however, Richard Schultes seemed the epitome of the plant explorer of the Victorian era. Most of the students realized on that day in 1949 that they were in the presence of an unusually brilliant, brave individual, who someday would become one of the most distinguished botanists of his generation.
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From page 341... ...
Department of Agriculture was about to remove support for the work on Hevea rubber. The reason was that in the United States synthetic rubber had taken over the automobile tire industry and use of natural rubber seemed to be on the way out.
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From page 342... ...
Hoffman, Plants of the Gods, the title page contains a caution: "This book is not intended as a guide to the use of hallucinogenic plants." In a review of the book, Lee Dembart of the Los Angeles Times concluded that "at a time of public hysteria over the use of drugs it takes guts to bring out this book, caution or no." Richard Evans Schultes was born in Boston on January 12, 1915. His parents were working-class German immigrants; his father was a plumber who worked for a local brewery
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From page 343... ...
He had originally intended to pursue a career in medicine, but soon changed his mind and returned to his earlier interest in botany. For his undergraduate honors dissertation he chose a study of the peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus used by Indian tribes in the western United States during ceremonies intended to commune with their ancestors.
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From page 344... ...
He traveled to Oaxaca in Mexico and together with local botanist Blas Pablo Reko visited a tribe of Mazatec Indians who used teonanacatl in their religious ceremonies. He discovered that the hallucinogenic plant was a mushroom, now known as Panaeolus sphinctrinus, described by native healers as "the little holy ones." A year later he was able to identify the morning glory, Turbina corymbosa, as the source of the even more potent hallucinogen.
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From page 345... ...
In the 1920s the natural rubber industry had moved to Malaysia and other countries in Southeast Asia when it became clear that Hevea could not be grown in extensive plantations because of a devastating fungus, the agent of South American leaf blight, Dothidella ulei. In the forest individual rubber trees grow at widely separate locations and the fungal parasite does not build up to epidemic proportions.
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From page 346... ...
Back at Harvard in 1953 he began the intensive work of identifying the multitude of plants he had collected in Colombia, published extensively about hallucinogenic plants, wrote several books about his experiences with native tribes in the Amazon, and taught a course in economic botany. Although not a charismatic teacher, he nonetheless became popular for his endless tales of exploration and his wickedly dry humor.
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From page 347... ...
His laboratory became the center of ethnobotany in the United States, and he attracted numerous students who followed in his footsteps, among them Tim Plowman, who died in 1989, and Mark J Plotkin and Wade Davis, well-known authors of bestselling books on the use of hallucinogenic plants by native people in the tropical forests.
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From page 348... ...
In 1959 Richard married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, an opera soprano who performed in Europe and the United States. They had three children: Richard Evans Schultes II, a corporate executive; Alexandra Ames Schultes, a physician; and Neil Park Schultes, a molecular geneticist.
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From page 349... ...
9:123-127. The genus Hevea in Colombia.
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From page 350... ...
1972 From witch doctor to modern medicine: Searching the American tropics for potentially new medicinal plants. Arnoldia 32:198-219.
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From page 351... ...
R I C H A R D E V A N S S C H U L T E S 351 1982 With W
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