Dr. Mark Plotkin is a renowned ethnobotanist and conservationist who contributed to making "ethnobotanist" a household word with his best-selling book "Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice". Plotkin was a student of legendary ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard. He gave a guest lecture in ANT 335, Shamanism, Psychedelics and Plant Intelligence taught by Visiting Professor Glenn H. Shepard '87, on February 26, about the pioneering legacy of Schultes in the scientific description of important psychedelic plants and fungi including peyote, Psilocybe mushrooms and ayahuasca. 

Although Schultes was a key scientist in the discovery of both Psilocybe mushrooms and ayahuasca, and thus a major contributor to the Psychedelic Revolution of the 1960s, he was also very humble and respectful of indigenous knowledge, claiming that he didn't discover anything: it was indigenous peoples who actually made the discoveries.