Then (1993), True Hallucinations
Dennis McKenna's Scientific Career: What La Chorrera Built
Terence treated Dennis as the scientific grounding of the La Chorrera expedition, the botanist who would provide the empirical anchor for the speculative cosmological work. Dennis was 19 years old at La Chorrera. Terence could not have predicted what Dennis's career would become.
partially-confirmed
Dennis McKenna went on to: PhD in botanical sciences from UBC (1984); postdoctoral research at Stanford; co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute (1993, which funded some of the earliest Johns Hopkins psilocybin research); research scientist at Aveda and Shaman Pharmaceuticals; Senior Lecturer at the University of Minnesota; co-author of the first pharmacological description of ayahuasca's MAO inhibition mechanism (McKenna et al., 1984). His ayahuasca pharmacology papers are foundational in the field. The Heffter Institute he co-founded funded Roland Griffiths's psilocybin safety study (2001), which launched the modern research renaissance. La Chorrera sent Dennis into pharmacological botany; his career built the institutional infrastructure that produced the psychedelic research renaissance.
Sources
- McKenna et al., Journal of Ethnopharmacology (1984), ayahuasca MAO mechanism
- Heffter Research Institute founding documents (1993)
- Griffiths et al., Psychopharmacology (2006)