Night of the Liana: Scientists Take Ayahuasca

“Ten years after publishing The Cosmic Serpent, Narby brought three molecular biologists to the Peruvian Amazon for ayahuasca sessions under shamanic guidance. The resulting documentary captures what happened when skeptical scientists encountered what the book described.”

The Cosmic Serpent was published in 1998 and was criticized, most systematically, for failing to test its central hypothesis. Jacques Dubochet, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, wrote that Narby had not designed any experimental protocol for determining whether shamans actually access molecular-level information through ayahuasca.

Narby's response was, in effect, to run an experiment. Not a controlled clinical trial, that was not available to him, but an observational expedition with trained scientists as participants.

In 2000, Narby organized a journey to the Peruvian Amazon that included three molecular biologists, researchers working in fields directly relevant to the DNA hypothesis. They participated in ayahuasca sessions under the guidance of Shipibo-Conibo shamans, then discussed what they had experienced in relation to their scientific knowledge.

The resulting documentary, Night of the Liana, directed by Jan Kounen, was released in 2011. It shows scientists experiencing visionary states that included imagery they described as consistent with molecular and cellular structures, though they were careful about what claims they would make about what this meant.

Narby published a follow-up book, Intelligence in Nature (2005), which extended the DNA communication hypothesis into a broader argument: that intelligence, the capacity to solve problems, to communicate, to adapt, is not uniquely human but is distributed across the natural world at multiple scales. The argument drew on research into plant signaling, fungal networks, and bacterial communication.

The Night of the Liana expedition didn't prove The Cosmic Serpent's hypothesis. But it demonstrated the seriousness with which credentialed scientists could engage with it, and produced a documentary record of what the encounter between shamanic ayahuasca tradition and Western molecular biology actually looked like when it happened.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Jeremy Narby
• Night of the Liana documentary (2011)
• Narby, Intelligence in Nature (2005)