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"The Father of Ethnobotany"
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 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, Heindrick 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.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.
Awards include the Cross of Boyaca, Colombia's highest honor, and the annual Gold Medal of the World Wildlife Fund. In 1987 I received the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and in 1992 was awarded the Linnean Gold Medal, the highest award a botanist can receive. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linnean Society of London, three Latin American Academies, the Academy of India, And Third World Academy of Sciences.
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