Interview: Richard Schultes
The Father of Modern Ethnobotany

To start with, what is ethnobotany?

Richard Schultes: Ethnobotany simply means someone who is investigating plants used by primitive societies in various parts of the world. It's as simple as that. And ethnobotany has been around for many, many, many thousands of years. We are now trying to salvage some of the knowledge that primitive societies have amassed over thousands of years, and passed down from father to son orally. And with every road that goes in, every airport, every missionary, every commercial person, even tourism, this is fast disappearing.

Because, for example, when our own effective medicines are brought in and given to the Indians, they will forget, sometimes in one generation, what their forefathers discovered by experimentation. And we may be losing some wonderful short cuts to find new medicines for humanity as a whole. This is happening in all parts of the world where people still are living in what we call "primitive societies."

For someone who doesn't know a lot about botany and ethnobotany, how would you explain to them what's exciting about what you do?

Richard Schultes: I'm hoping that from my work, we may eventually find some chemicals in these plants that can be used medicinally.

Many of our common medicines were first discovered from plants, later synthesized to make them more available. But in the Amazon, for example, there are 80,000 species of plants. To give you some measuring rod, New England has 1,900 only. 80,000 species! If chemists are going to try to get material of 80,000 species and analyze them, and then give them to pharmacologists, this job will never be done, never be finished. What we should do is concentrate on those plants that people in these societies have found have some effect on the human body.

We may never use the chemicals in them. We may use them for the same purpose in some cases. We may use them for completely different reasons. For example...

What took me first to South America was to study arrow poisons, which in 1941 were becoming very important in medicine. They are important today, as the extracts are used as muscle relaxants before surgery. But here is a case: the Indian uses these poisoned arrows to kill; we are using them to help preserve life, completely different uses.

Another example is rotenone. The natives fish by throwing bark into still water in the Amazon, and these plants have rotenone in them. Now we don't want to poison our rivers any more than they are poisoned. We'd have no fish! But rotenone now is our best biodegradable insecticide. It can be sprayed over thousands of acres against insect damage, and in two or three days it is broken down, and it doesn't carry through and poison plants and animals and eventually human beings.

Some of my work may eventually pan out to be of help to humanity as a whole. I just published a book in which, in my small area of the Amazon, in the Republic of Colombia, we have 1,600 species of plants used as medicines or poisons by the natives. And, I am certain that in my 47 years of work there, I must have missed a lot. But, you can imagine 1,600 -- when the whole flora of my part of the United States, New England, has only 1,900, these people use at least 1,600!

What brought you down this path? What led you into the Amazon rain forest?

Richard Schultes: I was an undergraduate at Harvard, trained in botany and chemistry, and I became interested in medicinal botany. When I got my Ph.D., one of the job offers that I had was a grant from the National Research Council to go to the Amazon to study plant uses, especially the arrow poisons. So I took that and went down there. That was in 1941 when Pearl Harbor happened. I finally got back to Bogotá and went to the embassy. I was 26 or so and wanted to find my draft status. They said, "You are not going back to the States, you are going right down into the Amazon and try to get the Indians to tap wild rubber. The Japanese have taken over all of Southeast Asia, where our plantations of rubber were established by the British and Dutch. We have no more rubber, which is essential, especially for the heavy military planes." The United States government and local governments of the Amazon countries were sending men in to try to resuscitate the extraction of rubber from wild trees.

The main rubber tree, which the British took to Malaysia, was the basis of all plantations. There are nine other plants in that same group from which the Indians once got rubber. But the plantations had started to supply the world with better and cheaper rubber than the Indians had been producing under terrible -- almost slave -- conditions. So the Indians had three or four generations when they hadn't tapped wild rubber, and we were sent into the various countries to try to stimulate this for the war effort. I had been in the Amazon of Colombia, so I went right back among my Indians, and I worked on that during the war.

How were you received by those Indians who had been so exploited by rubber producers in the past? How did you get along with them?

Richard Schultes: I never had any problems with Indians. The Indian in the Colombian Amazon -- and I suppose everywhere else, until he is civilized -- is a wonderful person. If he likes you -- and I guess they liked me, and I liked them -- if you act as a gentlemen among these people they are gentlemen.

I was with them all the time that I worked there, because we had very few European type people going down into that part of the Amazon. It's not easy to get around because of rapids, and waterfalls, and lack of air service and so forth.

How did you communicate with the Indians, in what language?

Richard Schultes: I always tried to find, an Indian who could speak Spanish. My Spanish, of course, was probably poorer than the Indian's at that time. As I got further and further inland this was much more difficult, but I was able to get along in two of the most widely spoken of the 14 Indian languages. I probably murdered them! The old folks wouldn't laugh, but when the kids went into hysterics, I knew I'd done something wrong.

Many of the Indian languages are used only by small groups that are dying out, or by a very limited number of people. If you learn one of or two of the languages of the big groups of Indians, you can almost always find an Indian in the small groups who could speak this other language. It's like going into Europe with English. If you get in trouble, you can almost always find somebody who can speak English. But as I say, you learn a lot by listening to the kids. They laugh when you say something wrong.

I understand that one group of Indians chose you to be a brother of the tribe. Why do you think they did that?

Richard Schultes: I could work for three or four months with one Indian or two Indians, and they'd go on trips with me, far away from their big round houses, which are called malocas. If one of these Indians says he will accompany you on a ten-day or two-week paddle upstream, you can be sure, if he is an uncivilized Indian, that he will do it and bring you back. If he knows that there is going to be a big tribal fiesta in a few days or a week, and he says he won't go, the atom bomb wouldn't make him go. There was one time they brought me back when I didn't know much about it.

I had a heavy malarial fever, and I woke up in one of these big round houses in my hammock, which they had stretched up, and I was in it. If they had been some of our so-called civilized people, they would have left me in the forest and taken everything I had -- adios! I never felt -- one time I had a boy who worked with me about six weeks, seven weeks. After the first week he told me he'd killed a white man, and I knew the white man. And, the white man had been bothering this boy's sister. There are no authorities down there, and they have to defend themselves that way. I kept right on working with this boy, and one of the best fellows I ever had. And, these are the experiences that I remember: kindness, if you want to use this term, of these people towards this intruder from outside.

Was it difficult work?

Richard Schultes: People say it's hard work.

I would consider being a bank teller behind a glass cage all day long would be far more difficult day after day after day, than to be free in the jungle of the Amazon. Everyday something new happened. Every day I might be able to find a species new to science, which I was able to do. And any botanist who goes in a flora as big as that can do this. And, this is one reason why it's an invigorating job. It's not a difficult job. It becomes another job, a job that you are really interested in doing and knowing about people, different kinds of people, and in a flora so rich in species that the possibilities of becoming bored don't exist.

Think back to 1941. When you arrived in the Amazon for the very first time, what was your reaction, what were your feelings?

Richard Schultes: The immensity of the forest. I knew from books that the Amazon was rich in a number of species, but... I never expected to see such a tangle of different roots, vines, lianas going up to the tops of 100-foot trees. And it is breathtaking. One of the first took me maybe six months or a year to get used to this. What shall I collect, with all of these plants? Of course you wanted to collect everything!

I had done some work in the highland of southern Mexico, which has a wonderful flora, but extremely limited in comparison with the wet lowland tropics of the Amazon. There are many plants that we have up here, such as oaks and pines. I really didn't feel that much out of New England when I could see a white pine, but in the Amazon everything was different. That's probably the first impression that I got. The second was of course to find these Indians so helpful, because I had read some of these books about how treacherous they were, and how dangerous. I don't believe in censorship, but I believe that some of our publishing houses should send manuscripts to people who have been in the Amazon before they publish some of these books.

What kind of experiences did you have when you were collecting plants? How did you find out if the natives had a practical use for a particular plant? What tipped you off?

Richard Schultes: I can tell you one experience, if we use that term. For example, I collected many plants that had no uses, because I was in a new region. The only other botanist who had ever been in my area was Richard Spruce 140 years ago, a British botanist who was there for four years. He did wonderful work. So even though a plant had no known use, I would collect it. All my work was in an 18-foot aluminum canoe, and I couldn't carry too much. So in each river I would collect a plant, once, unless I felt it might be a species new to science, and then I'd collect more. So we were paddling up the overhanging branches, and I'm collecting.

I may collect 30 or 40 different plants in a morning with the Indians paddling. And, in most cases they would say nothing if I took a plant and put it in the press. But every now and again, one of the -- usually the older men -- would say, "What do you want that plant for?" Now this tipped me off that they had a use of it. But, you don't go right out and say, "What do you use if for?" So, I invented many diseases. They must think my race is more decrepit than it is. And I said, "This plant may be a medicinal plant for my people. We don't have it where I live." They may say nothing. The next day, I would collect it again in another locality. They may say nothing. The third day, I would collect it again, then the curiosity. One of the older men would say, "That's no good for that sickness among your people." And I would ask, "How do you know that?" and he'd reply, "That's because we use it when we have a poison stomach from eating fish that has gone bad." I might have said this might cure a sprain in my knee or my elbow, and they would say, "That won't do any good." Then they get to arguing. The younger boy who is paddling, and the older man that is guiding the canoe, they might have differences of opinion. Then the older man would say, "Don't believe him, he is so young he doesn't really know." Then of course you check in another river with other Indians to see if they have that same use, a different use, or no use. This is very slow work because you have to check.

Not that these people are putting me on or lying about it; there is a scientific reason. If a plant is used over a wide area by people who have no contact with each other, for the same or similar purpose, that is a plant that should be investigated chemically because they have come up with the same or similar uses.

Here's a good example of this. There is a hallucinogenic snuff made from the resin that is in the bark of a certain tree in the Amazon, and all over Latin America. All the wet tropical forests have this tree. Now this resin has two other uses. One, in certain tribes it is put on arrows as an arrow poison. I've seen it work. We know what it is that causes it to be hallucinogenic, we still don't know what it is that kills an animal. It's not a fast death like the curare arrow poison, which is another plant. The other use is as an anti-fungal medicine. We have very little in our own pharmacopoeia for athlete's foot or for jock itch. We have suppressants, but if it gets into the living part of the skin, underneath the dead part which is outside, you have it for life, and all you can do is suppress it when it comes out, when the conditions are right.

So I thought this was very important. The natives in a number of tribes go out in the morning, strip some of the bark from this tree, take that red resin and paint it on fungus infections of the skin, which are very common in the wet tropics, ringworm and all those things. They go out, they let it dry. The next morning they do the same thing, and so on for ten or 15 days, and I have seen the redness disappear. Now this could be a suppression, or it could be a cure. They think it's a cure. But even if it's a suppression, we should know what it is that does that. Now I gathered a number of pieces of bark, and sent them to two drug firms on two different occasions. I had to dry them under the sun, because they are fresh and wet. If I just packaged them up, they would have been rotten after the month or two in the mails. They found nothing fungicidal in it, noting active against fungi.

Later, one of my students was working among Indians in Dutch Guiana. He found two tribes using the same plant for the same purpose. Dutch Guiana was 800 air miles from my area, and these people had had absolutely no contact, couldn't have had. Furthermore, reading back in an old French report on the plants of French Guiana in 1775, the same use was reported. With all of that, I assumed that my drying of these pieces of bark had changed the chemistry - ultraviolet light, the heat of the sun, or something. Recently, a very interesting thing happened. A very good resilient chemist working in Manaus, which is a city in the middle of the Amazon -- who could go out in his automobile and get fresh bark and get right back to the laboratory -- found three chemical substances, two of which he thinks are responsible for the fungicidal activity.

It's a long drawn out experience. I will probably never live long enough to see some of these things develop into new medicines.

Did you ever get lonely or discouraged, all that time that you were in the jungle?

Richard Schultes: No. I had one month vacation a year. I stayed down two years and then came home to Boston in the winter to skate and ski and get fat again for two months. I'd do a lot of identifications of the plants I had brought back, then go right back. In the early days, I rarely got up to Bogotá, the capital city, where I kept a room in a British boarding house. I didn't go often, because it took at least 12 or 13 days to get from where I was up to Bogotá. First by canoe, then by horseback, then by bus, and it was just not worth it. So I'd stay in six months, and one time 13 months in the field, living on native food, which is very good. It's monotonous, but very good.

When you make that discovery, when you find a plant that has uses that nobody had imagined, what are your feelings at that moment?

Richard Schultes: You have a feeling of achievement when you discover a new plant, even a plant that has no use. But if it has an interesting use, it gives you a lift, let's put it that way. It's a "thank you" for any work you put into finding this plant.

I worked a lot with medicine men, or they call them shamans. I like the word medicine man because it is easily understood by people. And I never found them reticent. I read in these books that are written by people who go down for a month or two how you have to pry their secrets from them. I never found this. I was there and I saw what they were using. I could speak with them about their beliefs, especially their super-sacred plants.

I was very much interested, ever since my undergraduate years here at Harvard, when I wrote a paper on the peyote plant. That is a hallucinogen, a cactus of the Southwest and of Mexico. That interest carried through all my work.

Among primitive peoples, I think in most parts of the world, certainly in the Amazon, there is no concept of organically caused sickness and death. It is all done by the invisible arrows from malevolent spirits. And, the hallucinogens are used in magical religious rites by primitive peoples. They're not abused as they are in our country and Europe by "civilized" people who have adopted them and use them without that religious background. The medicine man, and sometimes the ordinary Indians, through these visions that most of them produce, think that they are able to confer with the ancestors, or with the malevolent spirits. And, the medicine man thinks we can diagnose diseases which are caused by these malevolent spirits and somehow -- either with plants, or with mumbo-jumbo, or both, or with certain rituals and dances -- affect cures.

Now, my interest in hallucinogens is purely medicinal. I have never been able to understand the use of hallucinogens to get the religious experience. I don't believe we can get religion through chemical means. In that way we are different from the Indians who have thousands of years of background using these in so-called "magical" religious rites. They have no concept, as I said, of organically caused sickness or death. The Indian has to explain everything to himself. Why, thinking as an Indian,

Why do these few plants, out of a half a million in the world, have these unearthly effects on the mind, and sometimes on the body that they think and transport into outer realms of space? They have to explain this, and they believe that in these plants there is a resident spirit. We know that this resident spirit is a chemical substance. I have often told my students that I have never been invited at the theological school at Harvard to lecture. I'm a scientist. If I am, I can go and draw the formula of these spirits, and that is more than any theologian can do with his gods.

That's the reason these plants are separated from the ordinary plants that have dyes or are foods, or rubbers, or have other uses, or no uses. These are set on a pinnacle, and they are not abused as they are by many people in our own country and in Europe, civilized people, because these plants are sacred to them.

Do you feel that you have to take a certain amount of risk in the interest of science?

Richard Schultes: It was part of the work, it was part of the whole situation. Conjunctivitis, for example, is very common in the wet tropics. It is a contagious bacterial infection that affects the eye. They have a number of plants that they use to hasten the disappearance of the problem. I had it once, and I used one of their plants, a tea of the leaves of that plant. It happened to be a new plant of the pumpkin family which they cultivate for that purpose. The condition disappeared. Whether this was a natural cure and would have disappeared without a treatment, or it was the treatment that they used, I don't know. This is one of the difficulties of working so far away from laboratories. Another difficulty is when you have to dry leaves or bark to send them out to the States or Europe to a well-supplied laboratory for analysis; you may have changed the chemistry.

You hardly seem to fit the popular image of the botanist, hunched over a microscope looking at a plant or a leaf.

Richard Schultes: Well, we do that when I am up here, but I never took microscopes. I had a little hand lens to see the interior of flowers, but you can't do that kind of work in the field. Maybe you could do it up here in this climate, or where you can use automobiles as so forth. But the only equipment I took in was two cameras, a Leica and a Roloflex. Unfortunately, no movie camera because we didn't have room in an 18-foot canoe, and because they are so delicate. If something went wrong, I'd have to carry around the damn useless thing and no radio, naturally.

I never felt the need of a radio. I remember I was there during the war in Korea. When I came out to Bogotá, I heard about the war in Korea, the papers were full of it. Six months I came out and they were talking about peace in Korea. Another four or six months later, peace talks in Korea. So, what's the sense of being a slave to the radio every day? I wasn't. I didn't know what was happening, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway, so I never worried about not being up with the news.

Were you ever worried about your life? Were you ever in situations where you worried about your survival?

Richard Schultes: Before penicillin was available, I developed septicemia, blood poisoning in my arm. Fortunately, I was near enough to walk to a place where they had a Colombian military flight, and I was able to get out. My arm was all swollen and red. I knew what it was. We got to the army base at Villa Vicencio, a little town at the base of the mountains. I was going to catch a bus and go to Bogotá and see a doctor, but the road had been destroyed by landslides during the wet season. You couldn't get out of Villa Vicencio. So I went to a doctor in Villa Vicencio, and he gave me a shot of something, and I passed out. I don't know what it was. There was only one American and his wife in that town, a man by the name of Dr. Marston Bates, who was working on the Rockefeller experiment which eventually led to the inoculation against yellow fever. The doctor called him, and I woke up in Marston's house. He made a thing with electric bulbs, sort of a tunnel, and put my arm in this. The doctor was able to get the sulfa drugs, and they saved my life and my arm. That was the only time I was really worried, when I found I couldn't get to Bogotá with this arm in that condition, but nothing else.

Really? Thirteen years in the jungle, and you had no other health problems?

Richard Schultes: Except for that one septicemia, which I had in the early days before penicillin was available, the only thing I really had was malaria a number of times. There is no preventative of malaria, except recently, a vaccine has been developed by a Colombian doctor for one type only. There are suppressants. These tourists that are told to take one pill a week of Aralen are suppressing. If they get bitten by one or two mosquitoes, there is enough "threshold," we call it, in the blood to take care of the infection. When I first went in, the Rockefeller tropical doctors told me do not dose yourself up with these suppressants. If you are bitten by 50 infected mosquitoes, there isn't enough in that low threshold to kill all of the organisms. Once you have had malaria, you know from the symptoms two or three days before you are going to have the fever. Then you take double the dose, and knock that out. So aside from the normal care, being in an Indian house after dark when the mosquitoes are mostly out (although in the daytime some of them will be flying in the forest), we always wear long sleeves, never shorts - long sleeves, long trousers.

You have a photograph that shows a Colombian Indian next to a rock. Can you tell me about that photograph?

Richard Schultes: That's an extremely sacred point in the Rio Piraparaná.

That is a hard granite rock, and nobody knows what Indians did that -- probably a thousand years ago -- how they did it without modern instruments, chipping that away -- some of the engravings are an inch deep. This is one of their gods, one of their spirits. We don't use the word "god." They don't have that idea. It's a spirit. This is the spirit of water, or of the river. "Nie-Ei" it's called in their language. And, all the Indians of that area consider that the place where the first Indians came. It happens to be almost on the equator. And it tells that the people who did it knew a little about the astronomy, the sun and the moon and all these things, to pick the center of the earth. These people today believe it's the center of the earth. And, it is the place where the first Indians came from the Milky Way. They came down in a dugout canoe drawn by an anaconda snake, which to them is sacred. A man and a woman, and three plants: the tapioca plant, which they eat; the coca, the source of cocaine, which they chew; and ayahuasca, which is a hallucinogenic vine. And they landed there, and that's a very sacred place to the Indians.

I want you to look at that picture I have of it. A wonderful story and they told me that story.

I once met an American missionary woman who said these people have no religion. And I said, "I differ with you." I don't like to see missionaries meddling with other people's religions. Leave them with their own religion! I said "my Indians," and I told her the story. "Why," she said, "you don't believe that?" I said, "I didn't say I believed it." I said, "Do you believe Genesis?" "Oh," she said, "Yes, that's the word of God!" I said, "Is there anything more stupid, utterly stupid than the story of a snake running after a woman with an apple in its mouth?" "Why," she said, "that's symbolic! I said, "So are the other things symbolic!" She wouldn't speak to me the rest of the day.

Isn't there a story about a missionary who ruined that image with paint, and the Indians' reaction to that? Can you tell us about that?

Richard Schultes: I can tell you. I got this from a Colombian anthropologist who was recently there. This happened very recently, and I haven't been there for years. One of these missionaries went down, and apparently sprayed this pagan god with gray paint which hardened in the sun, and on the top he wrote in red letters, "Our Lady of Such-and-Such." Apparently, this anthropologist told me, the natives went into a revolution. Probably, he said, in the next 25 or 30 years there won't be any missionary who dares to go into that region, and I can't blame the Indians.

What has been the impact of the missionaries on that civilization, on those people?

Richard Schultes: When missionaries -- whatever their special brand of Christianity is -- come in, they change the whole social structure and beliefs of these Indians. In my opinion, what they have to give the Indian isn't a gift. He can't understand our religion. And, he's lost confidence in his religion. Another thing, when missionaries get into an area, other white people or civilized people follow them, and alcohol comes in and all of the bad things of our civilization follow. That's not the missionaries that do that, they mean well, but with them follow our civilizations.

The other thing is that these people usually don't wear clothes. The men wear breach cloths and the women --

When a missionary comes in he says, "You've got to wear clothes. It's immoral to run around this way." They don't need clothes. The Indian who never has clothes on has beautiful skin. He is two or three days in the river cleaning himself. The missionaries bring in -- or commercial people following them sell them -- clothing. They can't often get soap. They use plants that have saponins in them that foam, but they wear these clothes until they are so dirty that they get skin problems, and I've often argued with certain missionaries. They are not immoral. What is more immoral than our own race, and look at the clothes we wear! Of course, there is no answer to that. But, I suppose they pass me off as an infidel, which doesn't bother me at all.

How will these cultures survive these intrusions from missionaries and commercial interests?

Richard Schultes: Well, they begin to buy things. The missionaries bring in clothing and tools, which are good, and things of that sort. But they have to buy them. Then they have to start working to earn a little bit of money. This means that their agriculture, their fishing and hunting suffers. They don't have as much time as they used to have, and the whole structure is different. I would say the whole structure they know falls apart. I'm sure the missionaries and other people wouldn't agree with me, but I don't think we are giving them another social or religious structure that they can understand or live with. Part of it is based on the importation of things that they don't have, and they learn to need them. They certainly can't understand our religion; our own people can't understand some of the things in the Bible. Leave them alone. That's my opinion.

Tell us the story of trying to get your plant specimens out by airplane.

Richard Schultes: I had made a tremendous collection of plants, and the airplane that was going to take me out [of the jungle was the same one that] took me in. After a while in the early days, I had to go in over land and over by canoe and so forth. Later, I could fly in with hydroplanes. I would make an agreement with the pilot that on such-and-such a day -- let's say two months, three months later, weather permitting -- he'd be there. I'd have to put out a bed sheet, so he could see I was there before he landed.

But when the day came, there was no plane. It was a beautiful day, and he had always come on the day expected, but I said, "Maybe he's had some more urgent thing to do." So I waited and waited. I couldn't go more than a quarter of a mile away from that house in the forest because with the canopy of the top trees you can't hear the planes early enough to run back and put out that sheet. So I often say that that half-mile area -- a quarter mile each way around that house -- is the most thoroughly studied botanical area in the world. There isn't a moss that escaped my eye!

It was always going to be "the next day." Now, if I had only known what had happened! At first, I began to think there was a revolution in Bogotá, or the plane had crashed. They only had one or two of these hydroplanes. If I had known that it was going to be that long, I could have gone with Indians down the river through 22 rapids to the Brazilian frontier, where there is a small Colombian military post, which had a radio, and weekly airplane service. It got to where I'd hear this buzzing, and I'd say to the Indians, "There it is. It's coming." And they'd say, "No, Doctor. Avispas." It was wasps swarming around their houses making this buzz. Finally, after 62 days, they came!

When I got all my specimens on that plane to Bogotá, they told me what had happened. They were Catalinas. It's an old type of very heavy, slow plane, a cargo plane. The only place that these could be serviced and have their motors changed was Toronto. So they had sent both planes to Toronto, and it took almost all that time. When they came back, of course, they had many other urgent things to do. They figured, "Well, Schultes is there, he's happy, so we will go eventually."

Looking back on it, what do you think you have accomplished in all these years?

Richard Schultes: I've got a lot of material which students for many years hence will be studying. The dried specimens, with all their localities and uses, native names and scientific names. Secondly, I'm now publishing -- slowly -- my field notebooks. When I came home, I was teaching, a full load for 27 years, and I like teaching. I've been director of the Harvard Botanical Museum for 20 years, with all that administrative work. So I have had very little time for myself to write up my field notes. Now I am doing nothing but writing up my notes, slowly. It's taking a long while. I feel that out of my work on rubber, but especially on medicinal plants, there may eventually come some help for the rest of humanity. Some people say, "Oh, this is just exploiting the native." That's not true.

I'm not stealing anything from the natives, and if a new medicine comes out from one of these plants, it's possible that the natives themselves will have that medicine -- when it is once synthesized -- on a cheaper basis, and available through missionaries or commercial people or other things. Look at quinine, which was discovered by the Jesuits in Lima who had been told by the viceroy's wife, who was dying of malaria, and the Indians came in and said, "We use this: quinine tree up in the highlands." So they tried anything and it worked, and look how many hundreds of thousands of poor people - India alone - who could get cheap quinine eventually, when they made plantations. So, we're not exploiting the poor of the world because once the medicines are available cheaper and more easily, the poorer people can get them, or the so-called primitive peoples from whom we learned these things. And, all this nonsense about us going in and stealing the things from these natives and forgetting them? I never felt that way.

Have you done what you wanted to do in life? Is this what you wanted to do, or was it an accident that you wandered into it?

Richard Schultes: I had always had an interest in collecting plants. I'm a Bostonian, but a part of my family was up in the country. In those years, Townsend, Massachusetts was a little town, and one of my uncles had a farm. We spent the summer up there. I got up at five in the morning to milk, and go out haying, and so forth, and I made collections of plants. I never thought I could earn a living collecting plants. When I came to Harvard, I became interested in economic botany, the uses of plants. I took the course here in this room, where I ended up teaching, and I got so interested in this I went to the professor. Right in the back there on those tables we had a practical laboratory each week. The week we studied narcotics, we couldn't have a practical laboratory, naturally.

And, the professor had put out on a bookshelf over there, six books. He said, "Instead of a laboratory, this week I want you to read one of these books." I must have been very busy, so I flew over and I picked out the smallest book. That book changed my life. It was written by a physiological psychologist, Heinrick Kluver, on the peyote cactus. I got so excited about this, this beautifully written book that I went to Professor Ames, and I said, "Do you think I could write my undergraduate thesis -- we have to have for honors an undergraduate thesis here -- on peyote?" I had made a report on that book, and I said, "This is what I want to go into."

I was a pre-med student. But this put me in touch with medicinal plants. Hallucinogens, but medicinal as well. So he said, "Yes, but no student of mine writes a literary thesis. You have to go out and see this plant used." So I went way out west - a Bostonian who had never been west of the Hudson River, until I was a junior. I went way out west to Oklahoma.

I must have thought I was going to drop off the edge of the earth. And, I studied the native Kiowa and Comanche Indians in their all-night ceremony. I went out with a graduate student of anthropology from Yale. You see how broadminded we are at Harvard? A Harvard and Yale man together!

We went through a couple of those all-night ceremonies, we took the peyote, and I got peyote back, and did some botanical and chemical work, and that was my undergraduate thesis. Then of course I went to Mexico and did work on the medicinal plants of the Mazatec Indians for my doctoral thesis. And I fell so much in love with Mexico, Oaxaca in the south of Mexico, that I thought my life would be devoted to that flora.

But, then came this opportunity to go for one year to the Amazon, on a grant, to study the Curare plants and their composition because extracts from it were becoming important in medicine as muscle relaxants. I took that up when I got my doctor's degree, and I thought I'd be going for a year.

When you were growing up, when you were a grade school kid, what kind of books did you read that influenced you?

Richard Schultes: I didn't go to school for a year. I had something wrong with my digestion. I couldn't keep anything on my stomach. I remember this old doctor. He said I had "stomach poisoning" - the old doctors, you know! Now my wife says I have a cast-iron stomach, and anyone who could live on the diet of the Amazon, it must be OK now. But in that year, my father and my mother went to the library and brought books out for me. And read to me. I could read a little, but they did most of the reading.

One of the books was made by Wallace, on the exploits -- the botanical exploits -- of Richard Spruce, the only other botanist who had been in my area of the Amazon. I loved this book. I don't say that this had anything to do with my going to the Amazon, but I think it did when I went to school and got so that I could read. I always went to the public library and tried to get books on travel. I think it did that, but I can't say that Richard Spruce, who is my great hero now, and I go to England almost every year and have gone to his little house where he, after 14 years in South America, he went home and lived 22 years writing up his notes in a little hamlet in Northern England, in Yorkshire. And, I have been able to raise money to put a plaque on his little house on the estate.

A wonderful man. But, I do think that my father and mother reading from that, and I looking at the pictures in it that he drew, interested me in reading travel books. But, I never knew that I'd be going into Richard Spruce's country until I actually went into it.

Has your work given you concerns about conservation or about the environment?

Richard Schultes: Yes, very much so. Brazil is destroying an area every year larger than Switzerland. They think the Amazon is endless. Colombia is not suffering from this anti-conservation craze for several reasons.

My concern is that there are many plants, especially localized plants that are becoming extinct before we even know the names of these plants, or give them names, much less before we analyze and see if they are useful for any purpose. And this is going on not only in Brazil, but in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Borneo, places like that. I've been to Malaysia and I went to Sabah, a part of Borneo, and the devastation to plants, oil palms, is tremendous there - a whole million acres at a time.

I recently had to go to Brazil with a group of Canadians who were making a documentary on rubber. They wanted to see rubber tapping in Brazil. They didn't know Portuguese; they didn't know how to get all this equipment around in the jungle, so they asked me to go. We went to Manaus, and I hired a plane to go up to a place where I knew they were tapping. This should have taken us twenty or twenty-five minutes. But this was the end of the six-month dry season, when they come in with bulldozers, flatten the forest, let it dry, and then they set fire to it. We passed 17 fires. Four of them were at least a million acres large! So much so that the pilot was afraid to over them, as high as he could get! He had to go around them! It took us forty minutes to get there.

So, why the fires? In a word: cattle. You see, in Brazil the rivers are wide and navigable. They can bring in bulldozers and all sorts of equipment, and flatten every stick in one million acres, planting grass for cattle. Now in that soil and climate, grass will not grow more than two or possibly three years. Then they move the cattle to another million acres. But what we call the "climax forest" -- the original forest -- will never take over such a large cleared area. It will be scrub vegetation only.

How much danger is the planet in?

Richard Schultes: I think it's in great danger. I think it's in great danger from the disruption of the forests, and the many effects that we are just still discovering that come from that. You see, the amount of pollution that our big cities in Europe and the United States put out cannot be purified by the temperate forests. They are working photosynthetically only a few months a year. Then they can't do anything. They don't breathe. They don't take in carbon dioxide and put out oxygen. We need the dense tropical forests with many more trees per acre. This pollution is blown all over the earth with the winds and it is purified by these great concentrations of green plants twelve months a year. There is a great difference.

And that's not only in Europe and the United States. For example, let's take Brazil. The Brazilians say, "That's a problem for you people." It's a problem for Brazil itself! Not only are they ruining the future of much of the Amazon, but one of the most polluted cities in the world is Sào Paulo.

You can hardly breathe in Sào Paulo; I've been there. And the Brazilians themselves should recognize this. No true conservationist believes that you should build a fence around the Amazon, keep people out, and make it a living museum. That's not conservation. But, a million acres at a time should never be allowed to be destroyed until studies of that have been made by a variety of different scientists, local or foreign, or both. And, the rate this is going, it's a great danger.

But the basic thing, as far as destruction of the forest goes, is control of the tremendously galloping population. Some have said the scientists have always increased production. There is a limit to that. We know that there is a limit not only from the destruction of the soil, but a biological limit of how much you can improve production by breeding different plants. Right now we find it difficult to feed the populations of the world in some of the densely populated, poorer nations. Partly because of distribution, but also because there isn't enough food, and it's going to be worse if we continue.

What has your personal life been like, with all the time you've spent in the field and on research trips? Have you been able to balance your personal life with your professional life?

Richard Schultes: I think I have. My wife and I have three children, first a boy, and a year and a half later, boy and girl twins. We have had no problems with them. Which, I think, is saying something today. We have been a very close family. I'd say a conservative, old-fashioned type family. And fortunately, they are all nearby.

I have one last question to ask. We are going to get a look at this blowgun that you have. Can you tell me what is the story behind this blowgun? Where did you get it?

Richard Schultes: Blowguns are used in most of the Amazon, especially in the western Amazon with poisoned darts. The natives hunt with them. They make many different kinds of curare, arrow poisons, from many different plants. They blow these little darts from these six or eight foot tubes that they make. They can shoot birds on the top of a 100-foot tree. And, they are very accurate. And not only that, of course. Some of the monkeys are very good eating! They go along in bands, and if they used a shotgun and missed, all the monkeys would be a mile away. If they miss with a blowgun, it's silent. If it hits its mark, it doesn't kill immediately. It relaxes the muscles so much that the monkey loses his grip and falls down, then they club him and he's dead. And, the other monkeys say, "What a damn fool, you can't hold on!" And then they get a second monkey. If they used a noisy firearm, the monkeys would be away. So, from that point of view it's wonderful. The thing that I found intriguing was how they run through the forest with these eight or nine foot, big things.

Now, as to this business of my blowgun, one of my lectures in this course was on poisons. I did this the first time, at the end of my lecture. I said, "Now that I have lectured about this curare business, I want to show you how the natives hunt." They put a cardboard box with a circle in it, and I was able, almost always, to hit the red mark in the middle, even though the thing, being horizontal, was not steady. After that, everybody who comes here wants me to do that! It's become famous, that wonderful blow gun!

Well you were also wonderful, and we thank you.

Thanks.