On April 10, 2001, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, perhaps best known as the father of ethnobotany, died at the age of 86. Schultes was an explorer, botanist, and Harvard professor who authored several definitive books on ethnobotany including The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline, Vine of the Soul, and Plants of the Gods (with Albert Hofmann).

He was an impeccable scholar and an avid adventurer. His research into the use of plants by indigenous cultures included, from the very beginning, a strong interest in plants with psychoactive properties. Though Dr. Schultes held strongly conservative political beliefs, he was a staunch believer in individual freedom, especially in regards to religion and the use of drugs.

While working in the Harvard Botanical Museum library during his second year in school, Schultes was inspired to enroll in an ethnobotany course. He quickly became interested in the use of peyote by Native American tribes. His professor, the curator of the botanical museum, Oakes Ames, supported him in his decision to write his undergraduate thesis on peyote and funded Schultes's trip to Oklahoma with Weston LaBarre (1936) to study the use of peyote among the Kiowa indians.

Two years later (1938), Schultes travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico with Pablo Reko to seek the identity of teonanacatl, or Flesh of the Gods, believed to be a mushroom, but as yet unidentified. He was successful in identifying three species of mushrooms used by the Mazatec indians of the region. Although the species were already recognized botanically, Schultes was the first to record their use as psychoactives.

Schultes soon moved on (1939) to the challenge of verifying the identification of ololiuqui, the Vine of the Serpent. Identified nearly 40 years earlier as Ipomoea sidaefolia (later renamed Turbina corymbosa), there had been recent disagreement amongst botanists about whether that identification was correct, with some claiming that ololiuqui was actually Datura meteloides. Schultes travels took him back to Mexico where he was able to verify the original identification.

Over the next few years, Dr. Schultes worked extensively with Amazonian tribes, recording and documenting their knowledge of the medicinal and spiritual use of thousands of plants. He collected botanical medicines, hallucinogens, and poisons, identified 14 plant sources of curare, worked with yoco (a local stimulant), gathered data on yage (ayahuasca), and participated in the ritual use of many of the plants he researched.

Schultes was soon caught up in World War II, recruited by the United States to find an Amazonian source for rubber. The U.S. war effort depended on this natural product and 99% of its pre-war supply came from areas of Southeast Asia which had come under Japanese control. For the next 10 years, he devoted much of his time and effort to the development of a disease resistant strain of rubber tree, only to have the project eventually cancelled.

During the 40's and 50's, with only brief trips back to the U.S., he trekked through the Amazon, collecting more than 20,000 specimens of promising plants and gathering information about them from shamans and villagers knowledgeable in their use. After returning to the United States, Schultes took care to warn that the plants of the Amazon, as well as native knowledge of their use, were endangered. It was this belief which, in part, fueled his intensive study of the ethnobotanical knowledge of indigenous people.

In 1953, Schultes became the curator of the Orchid Herbarium at Harvard and later the director of the Botanical Museum. During the next 30 years, he taught at Harvard, and published more than 10 books and 450 scientific articles, many of them about psychoactives. After retiring in 1985 he went on to publish Plants of the Gods (with Albert Hofmann) which remains one of the best references on entheogenic plants.

His work inspired a new generation of ethnobotanists, including Tim Plowman, who died in 1989, Wade Davis, and Mark Plotkin, who have continued in his footsteps with the study of native peoples and plants.