Richard Evans Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes was an ethnobotanist who had been a medical student when he learned about Heinrich Kluver's work on mescaline. He hypothesized that Reko's second sample, the mushroom, was the mysterious teonanacatl described by Spanish chroniclers. Schultes and a graduate student published evidence identifying teonanacatl as a psychoactive mushroom.

Schultes accompanied Reko to a village in the Sierra Mazatecan highlands to collect specimens of psychoactive mushrooms for Harvard, but their work was interrupted by the war during the late 1930s. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services studying rubber extraction in the Amazon Basin until the invention of synthetic rubber. He was there for more than fifteen years.

During his time in the Basin he studied and collected orchids. He would later write about his work among the shamans of the Sibundoy Valley of Southern Colombia. Although his early interest was peyote and mushrooms...