The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (67 page)

As the light energy was used to ionize the water, the oxygen liberated in the process rose with a shriek to escape from the chamber of horrors, while the electrons, liberated from their matrix, were shunted into the electron-transport rollercoaster, sliding down the chain of cytochromes like a dancer being passed from partner to partner, into the waiting arms of “photosystem I,” only to be blasted again by yet another photonic charge, bounced into the close but fleeting embrace of ferredoxin, the primary electron acceptor, ultimately captured by NADP
⁺
to be used as bait to capture two elusive protons, as a flame draws a moth. Suddenly I was outside the flattened thylakoid structures, which from my perspective looked like high-rise, circular apartment buildings. I recognized that I was suspended in the stroma, the region outside the thylakoid membranes, where the mysterious “dark reaction” takes place, the alchemical wedding that joins carbon dioxide to ribulose diphosphate, a shotgun marriage presided over by ribulose diphosphate carboxylase, the first enzyme in the so-called pentose phosphate shunt. All was quiet and for a moment, I was floating free in darkness; then miraculously—miracles were by this time mundane—I realized that my disembodied point of view had been reincarnated again, and was now embedded in the matrix of the newly reduced ribulose diphosphate/carbon dioxide complex; this unstable intermediate was rapidly falling apart into two molecules of phosphoglycerate, which were grabbed and loaded on the merry-go-round by the first enzymes of the Calvin cycle. Dimly, I struggled to remember my early botany lessons and put names to what I was seeing.

I recognized that I had entered the first phases of the pentose phosphate shunt, the biochemical pathway that builds the initial products of photosynthesis into complex sugars and sends them spinning from thence into the myriad pathways of biosynthesis that ultimately generate the molecular stuff of life.

I felt humbled, shaken, exhausted, and exalted all at the same time. Suddenly, I was ripped out of my molecular rollercoaster ride, and my disembodied eye was again suspended high over the Amazon basin. This time, there was no world tree arising from its center; it looked much like it must look from a spacecraft in orbit. The day was sunny, the vista stretching to the curved horizon was blue and green and bluish-green, the vegetation below, threaded with shining rivers, looked like green mold covering an overgrown petri plate. Suddenly I was wracked with a sense of overwhelming sadness, sadness mixed with fear for the delicate balance of life on this planet, the fragile processes that drive and sustain life, sadness for the fate of our planet and its precious cargo.

“What will happen if we destroy the Amazon,” I thought to myself, “what will become of us, what will become of life itself, if we allow this destruction to continue? We cannot let this happen. It must be stopped, at any cost.” I was weeping. I felt miserable, I felt anger and rage toward my own rapacious, destructive species, scarcely aware of its own devastating power, a species that cares little about the swath of destruction it leaves in its wake as it thoughtlessly decimates ecosystems and burns thousands of acres of rainforest. I was filled with loathing and shame.

Suddenly, again from behind my left shoulder, came a quiet voice. “You monkeys only
think
you’re running things,” it said. “You don’t think we would really allow this to happen, do you?” And somehow, I knew that the “we” in that statement was the entire community of species that constitute the planetary biosphere. I knew that I had been given an inestimable gift, a piece of gnosis and wisdom straight from the heart-mind of planetary intelligence, conveyed in visions and thought by an infinitely wise, incredibly ancient, and enormously compassionate “ambassador” to the human community. A sense of relief, tempered with hope, washed over me. The vision faded, and I opened my eyes, to see my newfound friends and hosts all eagerly gathered around me. The ceremony had officially ended a few minutes earlier; I had been utterly oblivious to whatever was going on in the world beyond my closed eyelids. “How was it,” they wanted to know, “did you feel the
buhachara
, the strange force?” I smiled to myself, feeling overjoyed at the prospect of sharing the experience and knowing that I had indeed been allowed to experience the ultimate “force,” the vastly alien, incredibly complex molecular machine that is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Chapter 47 - New in Town

I eventually became disillusioned with aspects of my job at Shaman Pharmaceuticals, or perhaps my doubts were really about my potential for success as a corporate scientist. I’d grown to like my colleagues and enjoy the work, but I decided to look for other opportunities. Andrew Weil had contacted me to suggest that I meet his friend Horst Rechelbacher, the founder of Aveda, a Minnesota-based cosmetics company that reflected his environmentally conscious views. Aveda was committed to using sustainable, organic ingredients from around the world, and Horst was looking for an ethnobotanist to help the company develop products from botanical ingredients. The word was that impending changes in regulatory policy would look favorably on herbal medicines, and the industry would explode as a result. Aveda was weighing whether to enter the market for nutraceuticals and dietary supplements and would need help in that area if they did.

Thanks to Weil, I got a chance to chat with Rechelbacher at a Seeds of Change conference in Santa Fe in the fall of 1992. (The event has since been renamed the Bioneers Conference and is held each year in San Rafael.) Our meeting went well. I knew the Austrian-born Horst by reputation as a visionary and an entrepreneurial genius. A self-made multimillionaire who had worked in the salon trade since his early teens, he’d built the Aveda Corporation from scratch. I wasn’t sure what I could do for him, I said; after all, I was a CNS pharmacologist and ethnobotanist. I did view myself a natural products chemist to some extent, but what did I know about cosmetics or cosmetic formulations? Horst assured me that didn’t matter. In effect, what he said was, if I came to work for him he’d pay me twice as much as I’d been making at Shaman, and I could do whatever I wanted. An offer like that was hard to pass up.

He invited me to visit their headquarters outside Minneapolis, and shortly after the conference I flew out to meet with him and some of his executives. I stayed at the Aveda Spa in the St. Croix Valley nearby his palatial home in Osceola, Wisconsin, and they treated me like royalty. Even though it was November and well into a gray autumn, the St. Croix Valley was beautiful, and the rural setting appealed to me. A move there would be a welcome escape from the urban density of the Bay Area. There was no way we could ever afford a house in California, but in Minnesota we just might pull it off. We were also drawn to the prospect of finding a nice school for Caitlin. All things considered, it made sense to pick up stakes and move. I returned to Menlo Park and gave notice at Shaman.

We left Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve 1992, angling the Honda south to avoid a blizzard that had blocked the passes along I-80 on the route through Tahoe. After a stop to visit Aunt Mayme in Paonia, we ran east over the plains, trying to outrace another storm that had swept in over the coast behind us. The snows finally caught up to us in Iowa, forcing us into a Holiday Inn outside Des Moines. When we finally reached Minneapolis and stepped out of the car, it was into near-zero temps and an icy, biting wind. As lightly clad California refugees in an unlikely promised land, we suddenly had our doubts about what we’d gotten into.

Day by day, however, we settled in. One lesson I’d learned at Shaman the hard way was that a verbal agreement wasn’t worth much in the corporate world, at least when it came to a starting salary. Horst, however, was as good as his word. I had a new position at more than twice what I’d been making, with an impressive title: Senior Research Pharmacognosist. I was delighted, of course, and launched into my new work with great hopes.

Horst was open to finding and incorporating natural ingredients from all over the globe and, if possible, sourcing them from indigenous communities. The new regulations wouldn’t become law for more than a year—the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, or DSHEA—but there were already plans afoot to position the company for the impending herbal gold rush. If predictions held, the new law would open new markets for natural medicines and create lots of opportunities for “pharmacognosists” like me. The term is derived from the Greek
pharmakon
, for drugs, and
gn
ô
sis
, knowledge; it refers to a specialist in the scientific study of drugs of natural origin. Despite my title, I wasn’t formally a pharmacognosist, but I was charged with taking the lead on product innovation in that arena.

We had a good meeting about the new mission shortly after I started my job. Weil, who had done so much to help me, was there, and we talked about the new direction we were charting. Shortly after that, Horst took off to India for six months and left me to the tender ministrations of the director of R&D and the chief financial officer. I began making plans for a trip to Brazil in the spring. Aveda already had a part-time field consultant in Manaus, a city in the heart of the Amazon, and had considered setting up a lab there. I wanted to connect with her and begin collecting around Manaus, looking for plants that could potentially be used as cosmetic ingredients, dietary supplements, or even food sources.

As I settled into my new job, Sheila started scanning the papers, searching for a house. We considered some neighborhoods in the Twin Cities but we really wanted to live somewhere along the St. Croix River. Over the course of our Sunday drives, we became utterly charmed by Marine on St. Croix, a quiet hamlet of 604 souls about ten miles north of Stillwater. We decided our new home had to be there. There wasn’t much on the market, but finally, we made an offer on a very small house in Marine, a classic case of the ugliest house on the best street in town. Twenty years later, we’re still here. After a modest renovation and expansion it has been the perfect home for us ever since.

Marine proved to be the ideal community it appeared to be. It has all the good things that small towns can offer, and, yes, some of the warts and blemishes as well. Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, his mythical Minnesota town, is often regarded as being loosely based on Marine. Keillor lived in Marine a few years before we arrived, and many of the skits and vignettes on his radio show,
A Prairie Home Companion,
were apparently inspired by the local array of eccentric characters and places. Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, the Chatterbox Café, and the Sidetrack Tap certainly seem like parodies of local businesses well known to any Marine resident.

Our choice to settle in Marine was fortuitous. It had a tiny elementary school, only about 170 students in total, recognized as one of the best K-6 schools in the state. All the children really
were
above average! We quickly made friends; there was another California refugee family from San Jose, a software developer and his wife who had arrived the year before with their two daughters, one of whom was Cait’s age. We met others in the community the same way, and we soon were part of a close-knit circle of friends based around our kids, not to mention similar liberal political persuasions. The kids are all grown now, but our little circle remains close. One could not wish for a finer bunch of friends and neighbors.

That first year in Marine was a rewarding time for me, at home, at work, and in the wider scientific circles whose respect I valued. I met good people at Aveda and enjoyed my modest prosperity. As I prepared for my trip to Brazil, I also followed up on a plan that emerged from the União do Vegetal conference in São Paulo in 1991. After that conference, I had drafted a proposal to carry out a biomedical investigation of ayahuasca that had since been approved by the UDV’s medical committee. We had also raised enough funds through Botanical Dimensions to carry out the study. I’d be in Brazil for almost eight weeks, most of them in Manaus, so we made plans to conduct the field phase of our study there in June. Our work took place over about five weeks at one of the oldest UDV temples in Manaus, Nucleo Caupari.

The Hoasca Study, as it came to be known, turned out to be a milestone event in the scientific investigation of the long-term use of ayahuasca. My colleagues and friends fulfilled important roles: Charles Grob, M.D., now a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA, was the principle investigator, and Jace Callaway, an American biochemist at the University of Kuopio in Finland, carried out most of the analytical and pharmacokinetic work. Many others also contributed. One key figure who went unacknowledged in the published findings was our friend Annelise Schinzinger, a longtime UDV member who worked closely with us as a Portuguese translator. The project could not have been accomplished without her help, and her recognition is long past due. Our study triggered a small surge in ayahuasca research, resulting in at least six peer-reviewed papers, several review papers, and major advances in our understanding of Ayahuasca pharmacology. There were only fourteen citations on Ayahuasca in Pubmed between 1960 and 1994; since then, there have been eighty-two publications.

In 1993, I also helped establish the Heffter Research Institute, a nonprofit organization committed to investigating “the appropriate and safe use of classical hallucinogens in a medical context.” The institute was the brainchild of David Nichols, the Purdue professor of pharmacology and medicinal chemistry I mentioned earlier, a world expert on the study of psychedelic compounds. The institute was named after Arthur Heffter, an obscure but admired figure in the history of psychedelic research. A German chemist, pharmacologist, and Renaissance man, Heffter was the first to systematically investigate the alkaloids of peyote cactus and demonstrate, in careful self-experiments, that mescaline was the major hallucinogenic compound in the plant. Beloved and admired by his students, Heffter didn’t fit the usual stereotype of the nineteenth-century German “Herr Professor.” We chose the name because he exemplified both the spirit of bold scientific exploration and the high ethical standards we wanted our institute to represent.