Wade Davis

Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist (a person who studies how people of a certain culture and region make use of indigenous plants) and was the host and cowriter of Earthguide, a series that aired on the Discovery channel. In 1985, he achieved literary and financial success with his autobiographical account of his investigations into the physiological and social aspects of Haitian zombification, The Serpent and the Rainbow, a book that served as the inspiration for a 1988 horror film of the same title. In it, Davis describes his infiltration of the Haitian secret societies known as the Bizango, whose practitioners manufactured a drug using tetrodotoxin, a poison extracted from female puffer fish. This drug, when injected into a human victim, was reputed to temporarily induce a physiological state simulating death, in effect creating "zombies," though...