Richard Evans Schultes

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For other people named Richard Evans, see Richard Evans (disambiguation).
Richard Evans Schultes
hallucinogenic plants; finding source of curare; campaigning for rainforest
Awards· Gold Medal - Linnean Society of London
· Gold Medal -
World Wildlife Fund
· The Cross of Boyaca
Scientific career
FieldsEthnobotany
InstitutionsHarvard University
Doctoral advisorOakes Ames
Doctoral studentsMichael J. Balick
Author abbrev. (botany)R.E.Schult.

Richard Evans Schultes (SHULL-tees;

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.[2]

Biography

Schultes was born in Boston; his father was a plumber.

botanist Richard Spruce.[1] He received a full scholarship to Harvard.[1]

On entering Harvard in 1933, Schultes planned to pursue medicine. However that changed after he took Biology 104, "Plants and Human Affairs," taught by

National Research Council to study the plants used to make curare.[3]

The entry of the United States into

Rubber Development Corporation, Schultes began work on rubber and concurrently undertook research on Amazonian ethnobotany, under a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.[3]

"The ethnobotanical researcher...must realize that far from being a superior individual, he - the civilized man - is in many respects far inferior...."
— Richard Schultes reflecting on his experiences with indigenous peoples[3]

Schultes' botanical field-work among

beriberi, repeated bouts of malaria, and near drowning.[3]

Schultes became curator of Harvard's Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium in 1953, curator of

inebriants, blowgun demonstrations, and hands-on labs (using plant sources of grain, paper, caffeine, dyes, medicines, and tropical fruits
). His composed and kindly persona and expressive eye gestures helped capture the imagination of the many students he inspired.

In 1959, Schultes married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, an opera soprano who performed in Europe and the United States. They had three children, Richard Evans Schultes II, and twins Alexandra Ames Schultes Wilson and Neil Parker Schultes.[1] Schultes retired from Harvard in 1985.[1] He was a member of King's Chapel church in Boston.[3] Despite his Germanic surname he was an anglophile.[3] He would often vote for the Queen of the United Kingdom during presidential elections because he didn't support the American Revolution.[5]

Influences

Schultes was led to study psychoactive drugs by

Weston LaBarre
in the early 1930s (in 1938, LaBarre based The Peyote Cult on these travels and observations).

In Western culture, Schultes' discoveries influenced writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery, such as

William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda.[1][5] Although he contributed to the psychedelic era with his discoveries, he personally disdained its proponents, dismissing drug guru and fellow Harvard professor Timothy Leary for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled the Latin names of the plants.[1] When Burroughs described his ayahuasca visions as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Schultes famously replied, "That's funny, Bill, all I saw was colors."[1][4][5]

Schultes' personal hero was Richard Spruce, a British naturalist who spent seventeen years exploring the Amazon rainforest.[1]

Schultes, in both his life and his work, has directly influenced notable people as diverse as biologist

E.O. Wilson, physician Andrew Weil, psychologist Daniel Goleman, poet Allen Ginsberg, ethnobotanist, conservationist and author Mark Plotkin, and authors Alejo Carpentier, Mary Mackey, and William S. Burroughs. Timothy Plowman, authority on the genus Erythroxylum (coca) and ethnobotanist, and Wade Davis
were his students at Harvard.

Distinctions

Schultes received numerous awards and decorations including:

Schultes is one of the leading characters in the prestigious Colombian film El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent) (2015), directed by Ciro Guerra and critically acclaimed. The film depicts Schultes' search for a mysterious plant through the Amazon jungle, and he was played by actor Brionne Davis. The film specifically credits both his diaries and those accounts of an earlier Amazonian explorer, the German scientist Theodor Koch-Grünberg.

In 1962 botanist

Hunz. published Schultesianthus which is also a genus of flowering plants from South America, but belonging to the family Solanaceae and also named in Moore's honour.[8]

Selected works
The standard author abbreviation R.E.Schult. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[9]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Jonathan Kandell, Richard E. Schultes, 86, Dies; Trailblazing Authority on Hallucinogenic Plants, The New York Times, April 13, 2001, Accessed April 26, 2020.
  2. ^ Review of the expanded edition
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Richard Evans Schultes: Memorial Minute, Harvard Gazette, September 18, 2003, Accessed March 11, 2015.
  4. ^ a b Tedd Mann, Magnificent Visions, Vanity Fair, December 2011, Accessed March 11, 2015.
  5. ^ a b c D. James Romero, The Father of Psychedelics? Just a Plant Guy, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1996, Accessed March 11, 2015.
  6. American Academy of Achievement
    .
  7. ^ "Resia H.E.Moore | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science". Plants of the World Online. Retrieved 20 January 2022.
  8. ^ "Schultesianthus Hunz. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science". Plants of the World Online. Retrieved 25 May 2021.
  9. ^ International Plant Names Index.  R.E.Schult.

External links

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