The Legal Status of Ethnobotanical Knowledge: Who Owns What Schultes Found

“Schultes documented 24,000 plant species in twelve years. His herbarium is at Harvard. The communities whose knowledge helped him find those plants have no legal claim to either the specimens or the knowledge they represent.”

Schultes built his Amazon herbarium through botanical training, extraordinary fieldwork, and sustained collaboration with indigenous communities whose knowledge guided him to the plants he documented. The herbarium, over 24,000 specimens, housed at the Harvard University Herbaria, is one of the most valuable collections of Amazonian botanical material in the world.

The communities whose knowledge Schultes incorporated have no legal claim to the herbarium, no rights to research papers published from it, no entitlement to royalties from pharmaceutical applications derived from it.

The Nagoya Protocol (2010) requires countries that have ratified it (138 as of 2024) to ensure companies accessing genetic resources and traditional knowledge share benefits with communities of origin. The protocol covers new commercial exploitation; it does not retroactively address decades of exploitation that preceded its entry into force.

For the communities Schultes worked with: the international legal framework that should protect their interests is in place but does not address historical appropriation; enforcement of that framework for new exploitation is weak; and institutions that benefited most from the earlier collaboration face no legal obligation to remediate.

Plants of the Gods documents what was found. Who it belonged to is the question the legal framework has begun to address and has not yet answered.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Nagoya Protocol (2010, in force 2014)
• WIPO IGC (2024)