The Man Who Spent Twelve Years in the Amazon

“Stay away from Schultes, a Harvard colleague warned a graduate student in the 1970s. He spent a decade alone in the Amazon. He's a dinosaur. The student ignored the advice. His name was Wade Davis.”

In December 1941, a twenty-six-year-old Harvard botanist received orders that would transform his life and, eventually, the history of pharmacology. Richard Evans Schultes had come to the Amazon on a one-year grant to study indigenous arrow poisons. The Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. His government needed rubber, the Japanese had taken Southeast Asia and with it the world's supply. Schultes was told to stay, help revive Amazonian rubber production, and then come back when it was done.

He stayed for twelve years.

When Schultes finally returned to Harvard in 1953, he carried something more valuable than rubber statistics: a comprehensive record of the psychoactive plant practices of dozens of Amazonian indigenous groups, the largest single collection of such documentation ever assembled by a Western scientist. He brought herbarium specimens, over 24,000 plant species, 300 previously unknown to science. He brought photographs, field notes, and chemical samples. And he brought a question that would occupy the rest of his life: how do indigenous peoples know what they know?

The question was not rhetorical. Schultes had documented practices of staggering pharmacological sophistication. The Amazonian preparation of ayahuasca combined two plants, Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis, whose interaction was not obvious from their separate properties. The vine contained MAO inhibitors; the leaf contained DMT. Without the combination, DMT is metabolically inactive when taken orally. In an Amazon of 80,000 plant species, indigenous people had identified these two specific plants and discovered their pharmacological synergy. Schultes watched this knowledge in practice and could not account for its origin through any model Western science offered.

His answer was not mystical. Schultes was constitutionally incapable of mysticism. He wore a suit in the jungle. He called his indigenous hosts 'native peoples' with unfashionable precision when the anthropological literature oscillated between condescension and romanticism. His answer was empirical and uncomfortable: he didn't know. The knowledge was real, he could verify its pharmacological accuracy, and its origin was unexplained. He catalogued it and moved on.

At Harvard, Schultes ran the Botanical Museum for decades and became the most influential ethnobotanist of the twentieth century without ever becoming famous. His students became famous: Wade Davis, whose One River is partly a portrait of Schultes; Mark Plotkin, who founded the Amazon Conservation Team; Tim Plowman, who led the definitive botanical study of coca. They became famous partly because Schultes taught them that the story was in the field, not the institution, and partly because he never bothered to become famous himself.

Plants of the Gods, co-authored with Albert Hofmann and published in 1979, was Schultes's only popular book. It was not written for popular audiences, it was written for the record. Ninety-one psychoactive plant species, organized by chemistry and culture, with descriptions of ritual use, botanical classification, and chemical analysis. A catalogue of what was being lost.

Because that was what Schultes knew, with increasing urgency as the decades passed: it was being lost. The aspirin pill. The mission school. The road. These were destroying in years what had taken millennia to accumulate. In 1967, at a government symposium, he said: 'In the search for new hallucinogens, we have much to do and little time in which to do it.' That was fifty years ago. The time has continued to run.

What Schultes documented, the pharmacological intelligence embedded in Amazonian plant practice, was not primitive knowledge that happened to work. It was a research tradition more ancient and in some respects more sophisticated than anything Western science could produce from the same materials in the same time. The ayahuasca preparation is the example that makes this plain: no laboratory starting from scratch in an Amazon rainforest could have identified that specific combination from among 80,000 candidate species in any foreseeable timeframe.

Schultes never speculated about how it was discovered. He documented that it existed. That may have been the more important contribution, the refusal to explain away what he could not explain, and the insistence on keeping the record straight.

Sources

• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• Davis, Wade. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (1996)
• Plotkin, Mark. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice (1993)
• Harvard Magazine, Richard Evans Schultes obituary (2001)
• Wikipedia, Richard Evans Schultes
• Academy of Achievement, Richard Evans Schultes interview