RICHARD E. SCHULTES, 86, AUTHORITY ON HALLUCINOGENIC PLANTS, DIES

Richard Evans Schultes, a swashbuckling scientist and influential
Harvard University educator who was widely considered the preeminent
authority on hallucinogenic and medicinal plants, died on Tuesday in
Boston. He was 86 and lived in Waltham, a Boston suburb.

Dr. Schultes (pronounced SHULL- tees) was often called the father of
ethnobotany, the field that studies the relationship between native
cultures and their use of plants. Over decades of research, mainly in
Colombia's Amazon region, he documented the use of more than 2,000
medicinal plants among Indians of a dozen tribes, many of whom had
never seen a white man before.

"I do not believe in hostile Indians," Dr. Schultes was quoted as
saying in a 1992 article about him in The New Yorker by E. J. Kahn
Jr. "All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is
reciprocal gentlemanliness."

Tall, muscular, wearing a pith helmet, he hiked and paddled through
Amazonia for months at a time. He collected more than 24,000 plant
specimens. More than 120 species bear his name, as does a 2.2
million-acre tract of protected rain forest in Colombia, Sector
Schultes, which the government there set aside in 1986.

"The last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition,"
was the way one of his former students, Wade Davis, described him in
his 1985 best-selling book, "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (Simon &
Schuster).

But more than a real-life Indiana Jones, Dr. Schultes was a
pioneering conservationist who raised alarms in the 1960's - long
before environmentalism became a worldwide concern - that the rain
forests and their native cultures were in danger of disappearing
under the onslaught of modern industry and agriculture. He reminded
his Harvard students that more than 90 tribes had become extinct in
Brazil alone over the first three-quarters of the 20th century.

"He believed ours would be the last generation fortunate enough to be
able to live and work among these tribes as he had," wrote one of Dr.
Schultes's disciples, Mark J. Plotkin, in "Tales of a Shaman's
Apprentice," (Viking, 1993), "to experience their traditional way of
life firsthand, and to record their vast ethnobotanical knowledge
before the plant species - or the people who used them - succumbed to
the march of progress."

Dr. Schultes's research into plants that produced hallucinogens like
peyote and ayahuasca made some of his books cult favorites among
youthful drug experimenters in the 1960's. His findings also
influenced cultural icons like Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs and
Carlos Castaneda, writers who considered hallucinogens as the
gateways to self-discovery.

Dr. Schultes disdained these self- appointed prophets of an inner
reality. He scathingly dismissed Timothy Leary, the drug guru of the
1960's who also taught at Harvard, for being so little versed in
hallucinogenic species that he misspelled the Latin names of the
plants.

According to a 1996 article in The Los Angeles Times, when Mr.
Burroughs once described a psychedelic trip as an earth-shaking
metaphysical experience, Dr. Schultes's response was, "That's funny,
Bill, all I saw was colors."

Dr. Schultes may have contributed to the psychedelic era with his
ethnobotanical discoveries, but to him these were the sacred plants
of Indians that should be studied for their medicinal value. He was
in many ways a throwback to an earlier epoch of scientific research.
He had no interest in publicity or self-promotion. Rather than
confine himself to a narrow specialty, he was a generalist who
crisscrossed several scientific disciplines.

Dr. Schultes taught more by personal example than by the use of
forceful intellect. His lecture room resembled an ethnographic
museum, with huge maps of Amazonia, native dance costumes, demon
masks, opium pipes, dried specimens of medicinal and hallucinogenic
plants, and a blowgun for poison-tipped darts, whose use he sometimes
gingerly demonstrated in class.

His former student, Dr. Plotkin, recalled a lecture in which the
professor showed slides of masked dancers in the Amazon under the
influence of a hallucinogenic potion. Referring to himself, Dr.
Schultes told the class: "The one on the left has a Harvard degree.
Next slide please."

Richard Evans Schultes traced his fascination with the South American
rain forests to the fantasies evoked while he was bedridden as a
child. He was born on Jan. 12, 1915, in Boston, where his father was
a plumber and his mother was a homemaker. Confined to his room for
months with a stomach ailment when he was about 5 years old, he
listened enraptured to excerpts read to him by his parents from
"Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes," a travel diary
kept by the 19th century British naturalist Richard Spruce. The
impression left by those passages was so powerful that the boy
decided to follow in Spruce's footsteps.

Receiving a full scholarship to Harvard, Mr. Schultes wrote an
undergraduate paper on the mind-altering properties of peyote, based
on research he undertook with Kiowa Indians in Oklahoma who ingested
the hallucinogen in ceremonies to commune with their ancestors. For
his doctoral thesis, also at Harvard, he chose the plants used by the
Indians of Oaxaca, a southern state of Mexico. In his research there,
he came across a species of morning glory seeds that contained a
natural form of LSD.

In 1941, Dr. Schultes traveled to the Colombian Amazon, where he
would spend most of his field research, and an area Spruce had
studied. At first, Dr. Schultes concentrated on plants that produced
curare. This substance, used by Indians as a fast-dissipating poison
to hunt prey, also proved to be vital as a muscle-relaxant during
major surgery in hospitals. The professor identified more than 70
plant species from which the Indians extracted curare.

Dr. Schultes was deep in the Colombian rain forest when news of Pearl
Harbor reached him more than a week after the Japanese attack. He
immediately made his way back to Bogota, the Colombian capital, and
visited the United States Embassy to enlist in the armed forces. But
the United States government decided his World War II services would
be much more valuable as a botanist doing research on natural rubber,
particularly since the Japanese occupied the Malayan plantations that
accounted for much of the world's rubber supplies.

Dr. Schultes soon became the leading expert in the field, collecting
and studying more than 3,500 specimens of Hevea, the tree family that
produces the latex from which rubber is made.

Throughout the 1940's and until the early 1950's, Dr. Schultes lived
almost continuously in the South American rain forests, with only
brief visits to the United States. On his journeys through the
tropics, he traveled lightly. He navigated scores of tributaries of
the Amazon River, using an aluminum canoe that he could handle
himself, though he usually hired Indians as paddlers and guides.

His supplies included a single change of clothing, a camera and film,
a hammock and blanket and a machete and clippers for plant
collecting. For food, he carried only cans of instant coffee and
Boston baked beans, preferring to rely on food offered by his Indian
hosts. This included the ground manioc roots that were their staple,
fish, wild game, insect grubs, fruit and chicha, a drink made from
fruits chewed and fermented by spittle.

His medicine kit consisted of vitamins, antibiotics and morphine - in
case he broke a limb and had to be transported for days before he
could receive proper treatment.

To collect and preserve plant specimens, Dr. Schultes devised a
method field researchers still use today. He soaked his plants in
formaldehyde diluted with water and then pressed them between
newspaper sheets. "On a good day, out in the forest, Schultes would
collect 20 or 30 specimens that he thought merited further
attention," Mr. Kahn wrote in The New Yorker. "Along a riverbank,
where foraging was easier, he sometimes bagged 80 or 90."

Often Dr. Schultes would consult local Indian shamans about the
properties of these species. A number of these medicinal plants now
carry his name, including, among many others, Pouroma schultesii, a
bark whose ashes are used to treat ulcers, Piper schultesii, a stem
brewed as a tea to relieve tubercular coughs, and Hiraea schultesii,
leaves whose soakings are used to cure conjunctivitis.

Dr. Schultes asserted that contrary to popular conceptions, Indian
shamans were eager to share their medical secrets with outsiders. But
"time is running out," he warned in a 1994 article in the journal The
Sciences, asserting, "The Indians' botanical knowledge is
disappearing even faster than the plants themselves."

In 1953, Dr. Schultes moved back to the United States as a professor
and botanical researcher and curator at Harvard. Six years later, he
married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, an opera soprano who performed in
Europe and the United States. His wife survives him, as do their
three children, Richard Evans Schultes II, a corporate executive;
Alexandra Ames Schultes Wilson, a physician; and her twin, Neil
Parker Schultes, a molecular geneticist.

Dr. Schultes, who retired from Harvard in 1985, published 10 books
and more than 450 scientific articles. For 18 years, beginning in
1962, he edited the scientific journal Economic Botany, and over much
of the same period, he served as an active member of the editorial
boards of Horticulture, Social Pharmacology, the Journal of Latin
American Folklore and other publications.

Among numerous awards, he received the 1992 gold medal of the Linnean
Society of London, which is often equated to a Nobel Prize for botany.