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Nature of a Hero

Mark Plotkin's Quest to Unlock the
Healing Secrets of the Amazon Rainforest

Linda L. Benanti

He has traveled down the Amazon in a canoe, chopped through thick underbrush of the rainforest with a machete, and lived and worked among the Indians to learn the secrets of their shamans. Are these the heroics of a character in a Hollywood adventure movie? No, they are the real-life adventures of Dr. Mark Plotkin, ALB '79, world-famous ethnobotanist and subject of the 1998 Academy Award-nominated IMAX documentary, Amazon.

Mark Plotkin collects plants with a medicine man in Suriname.

In a telephone interview from his office in Washington, DC, where he is Executive Director of the Amazon Conservation Team, Plotkin spoke modestly about his role in the movie that chronicles his work in ethnobotany--the study of plants as they are used by indigenous peoples. "Filmmaker Keith Merrill decided to make a movie about the Amazon, saw my book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, and hired me as a script consultant. I was put into the film as an afterthought." Amazon has played in theaters around the world and has broken box office records for an IMAX movie in Manhattan.

Plotkin, 44, is well-suited for his feature role. He is ruggedly handsome and knows his way around the northeast Amazon, an area comprised of nine countries that would cover most of the continental United States. He has lived and worked there, on and off, for the past 25 years, preserving the knowledge of the shamans--tribal "medicine men" who hold the secrets of the rainforest's curative plants.

But it has been a race against time for Plotkin. He has watched Western influences push the shamans to the brink of extinction. As t-shirts and sneakers replaced the Indian's red breechcloths and feathered headdresses, modern medicine's pills--many of them made from rainforest plants in the first place--took the place of tribal cures. And since the oral tradition of the shamans was not being passed on to the next generation, the culture's medical lore was in danger of being lost forever. According to Plotkin, "Every time one of these men dies, it is as if a library has burned down. In fact, it's worse than that, because this is knowledge that is recorded nowhere else."

Until now. Over the years, Plotkin has served as an apprentice to these shamans, learning their remedies and collecting promising new plant species. He's also developed the Shaman's Apprentice Program, a bridge that connects ancient wisdom to the younger generation. "My notes--the invaluable information supplied by the [shamans]--are translated back into the local language and studied by a young tribe member who is designated a shaman's apprentice," he said.

Plotkin spoke enthusiastically about the effect of this program: "Now, new protected areas of the jungle are being set up, and the Indians are doing it on their own. It's become a real grass roots effort, and what better effect could you have?"

Plotkin also is pleased his work is playing a role in increasing awareness about the importance of the rainforest, which some experts believe is dwindling at a rate of 100 acres per minute. Plotkin's concern is that with every tree that falls, the world could be losing a cure for cancer, AIDS, or heart disease, before it is even discovered.

Indeed, during this century, forests have yielded many of the drugs used in Western medicine. Quinine, for instance, from the bark of the cinchona tree, is used to cure malaria; vinblastine and vincristine, alkaloids from the rosy periwinkle, are effective in treating Hodgkin's disease and childhood cancers; curare, the muscle relaxant used during throat, rectal, and abdominal surgeries, is an extract from the jungle liana. In fact, Plotkin said, "a quarter of all prescription drugs sold in the United States have plant chemicals as active ingredients."

Although Plotkin is heartened by efforts to protect parts of the Amazon, he still expressed concern about its future. "Although people are beginning to realize that leaving the rainforest standing far outweighs the benefit of making a few more paper products and chopsticks, it's still disappearing quite rapidly," he said.

Plotkin has come a long way since the days the Indians called him "panakiri"--the alien. And he has worked hard to win their trust and friendship. This could mean anything from sitting around a campfire drinking a sour mash called cassava beer, to hunting the world's largest crocodile, to letting a shaman blow hallucinogenic snuff up his nostril during a tribal ceremony. Is Plotkin fearless? "I've always been fascinated by jungles and creatures, so it never seemed dangerous to me at the time," he said. "I lived for a while in New Haven and that seemed a whole lot scarier."

Plotkin has been interested in science for as long as he remembers. He spent childhood days hunting black rat snakes and cottonmouth water moccasins in the swamps surrounding his hometown of New Orleans. "I'd weigh and measure them, photograph and study them, and eventually let them go," he said. But it wasn't until 1974 that Plotkin discovered his true calling. At the age of 19, after only a semester at the University of Pennsylvania, he visited a high school classmate who attended Harvard College. The friend suggested Plotkin enroll in a night class at Harvard Extension School. "The course was called Biology 104: Plants and Human Affairs," Plotkin recalled. And it was taught by Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer ethnobotanist who is widely regarded as the father of the science. Schultes had spent years in the Amazon rainforest, and, during that first class, showed his students a slide of what appeared to be three Indians in grass skirts and bark masks, dancing under the effect of an hallucinogenic potion. When Schultes said, "The one on the left has a Harvard degree," Plotkin recognized the professor. "From that moment on I was hooked--hooked on plants, hooked on Indians, hooked on the Amazon," he said.

Plotkin continued to take courses at the Extension School and, to support himself, got a job as an assistant at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. "[I] spent my days building specimen cabinets and carting huge dinosaur bones from one end of the building to another," he said. It was there he met Russ Mittermeir, a Harvard graduate and biological anthropologist, who was about to leave for the Amazon in search of endangered crocodiles. Mittermeir needed someone to help capture, measure, and weigh some of the larger specimens and asked Plotkin to come along as his field assistant. "I jumped at the chance, and six months later I was in the jungle," Plotkin said. According to Plotkin, this trip gave him the chance to see the rainforest "from the inside." He was able to touch living specimens of plants that, up to this point, he only had read about in textbooks or had seen locked away in glass cases. It wasn't long before he yielded to the allure of the jungle and set out on his own in search of nature's healing secrets.

Plotkin has been going back to the jungle ever since. And he has experienced, first-hand, the healing art of the shamans: they have cured his earaches, vampire bat bites, and an old elbow injury that previously required anti-inflammatory agents and acupuncture. Plotkin recalled how a shaman of the Wayanas tribe rubbed the elbow with oils, surrounded him with a cloud of smoke from aromatic herbs, and intoned a series of chants to invoke the spirits. Plotkin called the ceremony "a watershed event," during which he learned healing is about more than pills or potions. "It's the genius of the shamans--they blend chemistry and spirituality; that's what all the smoke and dancing is about," he said.

Plotkin finds it encouraging that modern medicine is finally emulating what the shamans have practiced for hundreds of years. "Today we have visualization courses taught in medical schools; we're now using aromatherapy and massage therapy," he said.

Big business has also changed its outlook about the wisdom of the shamans and the importance of the rainforest. "When I began my work, no pharmaceutical firms had any interest in ethnobotany. But there's been a revolution in the last five years--[science] is finding a way to modify molecules in ways never before possible. Now pharmaceutical companies have a natural products initiative; they've discovered Mother Nature is a much better chemist," Plotkin said.

This shift in perspective is helpful to Plotkin and other members of the Amazon Conservation Team--the organization he founded to help protect the biological and cultural diversity of the rain forest. Along with his wife, Liliana, a conservationist and Chief Operating Officer, Plotkin and the group continue to create shaman's apprentice programs. They also have created internet sites that enable researchers to share information on ethnobiological research.

But Plotkin doesn't sit behind his desk for long. He said he returns to the Amazon "three or four times a year." Last year, he even introduced his two daughters, ages 9 and 11, to the wonders of the rainforest. "I served as a guide for the Harvard Alumni Club's trip, and I brought them along--sort of the equivalent of bring your daughter to work day," he joked.

Plotkin's ties to Harvard are still strong. He graduated cum laude from the Extension School in 1979 and said it has been the springboard for everything he's accomplished. "Because of my work at the Extension School, I got a very generous scholarship to Yale. Because of my work at Yale, I was able to go to Tufts for my PhD."

He also paid tribute to Professor Richard Schultes. Plotkin said his own work has brought his relationship with his former professor full circle: "It's really a way to pay him back--the Indians taught him, he taught me, and now I'm helping them." Indeed, Plotkin also is working to ensure that a portion of any funds made from indigenous plants be channeled back to the tribes.

Considering all he has done to help preserve their culture, it's small wonder the Indians now call Plotkin "jaco"--brother. But it's only one of the many changes he has experienced since the day he first saw the Amazon from a small canoe. "I have a few more gray hairs, I've seen a couple of revolutions, but it has broadened my spirituality; I know there are greater forces out there," he said.

Plotkin's passion for the rainforest, however, remains unchanged. "I would like people to realize that the Amazon is more valuable than all the great museums of the world: it's important medicinally, it's important culturally, it's important spiritually. We wouldn't think of burning a Picasso, but how little we think about losing the rainforest."

Plotkin's new book, Medicine Quest: In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets will be available from Viking Penguin in March, 2000. You can visit Plotkin and the Amazon Conservation Team at http://ethnobotany.org.

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