studying the peyote cult among the Plains Indians in his travels with Weston LaBarre in the early 1930s (in 1938, LaBarre based The Peyote Cult on these travels and observations). In Western culture, Schultes' discoveries influenced writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery, such as Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda. Although he contributed to the psychedelic era with his discoveries, he personally disdained its proponents, dismissing drug guru and fellow Harvard professor Timothy Leary for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled the Latin names of the plants. When Burroughs described his ayahuasca visions as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Schultes famously replied, "That's funny, Bill, all I saw was colors." Schultes' personal hero was Richard Spruce, a British naturalist who spent seventeen years exploring the Amazon rainforest. Schultes, in both his life and his work, has directly influenced notable people as diverse as biologist E.O. Wilson, physician Andrew Weil, psychologist Daniel Goleman, poet Allen Ginsberg, ethnobotanist, conservationist and author Mark Plotkin, and authors Alejo Carpentier, Mary Mackey, and William S. Burroughs. Timothy Plowman, authority on the genus Erythroxylum (coca) and ethnobotanist, and Wade Davis were his students at Harvard. Distinctions Schultes received numerous awards and decorations including: Gold Medal from the Linnean Society of London (1992), the most prestigious prize in botany; Gold Medal from the World Wildlife Fund. Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1988). Boyaca Cross (Cruz de Boyacá) 1986, highest award from the government of the Republic Of Colombia. Schultes is one of the leading characters in the prestigious Colombian film El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent) (2015), directed by Ciro Guerra and critically acclaimed. The film depicts Schultes' search for a mysterious plant through the Amazon jungle, and he was played by actor Brionne Davis. The film specifically credits both his diaries and those accounts of an earlier Amazonian explorer, the German scientist Theodor Koch-Grünberg. In 1962 botanist Harold E. Moore published Resia, which is a genus of flowering plants from South America, in the family Gesneriaceae and named in his honour. Then in 1977, botanist Hunz. published Schultesianthus which is also a genus of flowering plants from South America, but belonging to the family Solanaceae and also named in Moore's honour. Selected works See also Ethnobiology Psychoactive plants List of psychoactive plants Notes External links Plotkin, Mark (2022). Richard Evans Schultes: Brief