Discover the Best Books Written by Richard Evans Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes was an American biologist. He may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany. He is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He worked on entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants, particularly in Mexico and the Amazon, involving lifelong collaborations with chemists. 

He had charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University; several of his students and colleagues went on to write popular books and assume influential positions in museums, botanical gardens, and popular culture. His book The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (1979), co-authored with chemist Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, is considered his greatest popular work: it has never been out of print and was revised into an expanded second edition, based on a German translation by Christian Rätsch (1998), in 2001

Schultes was born in Boston; his father was a plumber. He grew up and was schooled in East Boston. His interest in South American rain forests traced back to his childhood. While he was bedridden, his parents read him excerpts of Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes by 19th-century English botanist Richard Spruce. He received a full scholarship to Harvard.

On entering Harvard in 1933, Schultes planned to pursue medicine. However, that changed after he took Biology 104, "Plants and Human Affairs," taught by an orchidologist and Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, Oakes Ames. Ames became a mentor, and Schultes became an assistant in the Botanical Museum; his senior undergraduate thesis studied the ritual use of peyote cactus among the Kiowa of Oklahoma. He obtained BA in Biology in 1937.

 Continuing at Harvard under Ames, he completed his Master of Arts in Biology in 1938 and his Ph.D. in Botany in 1941. Schultes' doctoral thesis investigated the lost identity of the Mexican hallucinogenic plants teonanácatl (mushrooms belonging to the genus Psilocybe) and ololiuqui (a morning glory species) in Oaxaca, Mexico. He received a fellowship from the National Research Council to study the plants used to make curare.

The entry of the United States into World War II saw Schultes diverted to the search for wild disease-resistant Hevea rubber species to free the United States from dependence on Southeast Asian rubber plantations, which had become unavailable owing to the Japanese occupation. In early 1942, Schultes began work on rubber as a field agent for the governmental Rubber Development Corporation and concurrently undertook research on Amazonian ethnobotany under a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.