20 Facts About Richard Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes was an American biologist.

Richard Schultes is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Richard Schultes worked on entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants, particularly in Mexico and the Amazon, involving lifelong collaborations with chemists.

Richard Schultes 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.

Richard Schultes grew up and was schooled in East Boston.

On entering Harvard in 1933, Richard Schultes planned to pursue medicine.

Ames became a mentor, and Richard Schultes became an assistant in the Botanical Museum; his undergraduate senior thesis studied the ritual use of peyote cactus among the Kiowa of Oklahoma, and he obtained BA in Biology in 1937.

Richard Schultes 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 Richard Schultes diverted to the search for wild disease-resistant Hevea rubber species in an effort to free the United States from dependence on Southeast Asian rubber plantations which had become unavailable owing to Japanese occupation.

In early 1942, as a field agent for the governmental Rubber Development Corporation, Richard Schultes began work on rubber and concurrently undertook research on Amazonian ethnobotany, under a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Richard Schultes collected over thirty thousand herbarium specimens and published numerous ethnobotanical discoveries including the source of the dart poison known as curare, now commonly employed as a muscle relaxant during surgery.

Richard Schultes was the first non-native individual to academically examine ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made out of Banisteriopsis caapi vine in combination with various plants; of which he identified Psychotria viridis and Diplopterys cabrerana, both of which contained a potent short-acting hallucinogen, N, N-Dimethyltryptamine.

Richard Schultes encountered dangers in his travels, including hunger, beriberi, repeated bouts of malaria, and near drowning.

Richard Schultes became curator of Harvard's Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium in 1953, curator of Economic Botany in 1958, and professor of biology in 1970.

Richard Schultes's composed and kindly persona and expressive eye gestures helped capture the imagination of the many students he inspired.

In 1959, Richard Schultes married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, an opera soprano who performed in Europe and the United States.

Richard Schultes was a member of King's Chapel church in Boston.

Richard Schultes was led to study psychoactive drugs by Heinrich Kluver, a leading scholar of this subject.

In Western culture, Richard Schultes' discoveries influenced writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery, such as Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda.

Richard Schultes is one of the leading characters in the prestigious Colombian film El abrazo de la serpiente, directed by Ciro Guerra and critically acclaimed.