By living with the Indians, he was able to win their trust, and as a result the Indians, in a gesture of friendliness, offered a tribal dance in his honor, in which Schultes was allowed to participate.
It was at one of these "parties" that Schultes first sampled yaje, a narcotic which produces visual hallucinations. He also tried coca, from which cocaine is extracted, by chewing the toasted and powdered leaves of the plant.
No Indian will go on a long hunting expedition without first preparing his daily chew of coca, and large quantities are used in tribal dances.
"I'm not interested in the experience of the hallucinogen, but in the scientific effects of the plant," Schultes says. "There are certain ones I just wouldn't take."
In the early '70s Schultes used his experiences to co-author a book on the botany and chemistry of hallucinogens, with Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD.
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Schultes grew up in East Boston and entered Harvard in 1932 after attending a local public school. Although he was a pre-medical student, he turned to botanical sciences in his third year after taking a botany course with Professor Oakes Ames. The course, known as Biology 104, "Plants and Human Affairs," is now taught by Schultes.
In fact, the course, taught at Harvard for over 100 years, is the University's oldest continuous annually offered course and the oldest course in the subject taught anywhere in the country.
Schultes worked in Mexico until 1940 doing research preparation for his Ph.D., which he received from Harvard in 1941.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was hired by the U.S. government to organize South American natives and resuscitate the rubber tapping industry, to counter Japanese control over natural rubber supplies in Asia.
With two Indian guides, Schultes explored the Amazon River, locating rubber trees. He spent the 14 years after the war living with the natives in the Amazon and continuing his research of plants.
In fact, he return there annually to continue and update his research.
While Schultes says he has suffered the "usual" tropical diseases, such as malaria and beri-beri, he downplays the adventurous side of his experiences.
"There have been things such as tipping over in the rapids, out up here there are automobile accidents. Undoubtedly, I'm safer there than I am in the streets of New York or Boston at night," he says, adding. "After a while it all becomes a part of the job."
Yet he admits that his years in the jungle gave him opportunities never before available to botanists, Up to that time, trees had been studied mostly from dried specimens.
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