A Journey into Ethnobotanical Drug Discovery

Steve began learning about tropical ecosystems, indigenous and local people in 1974 at the age 15 when he went to the Rio Polochic River area in Alta Verpaz, Guatemala as a volunteer paramedic with the NGO Amigos de los Americas where he supported volunteer MD’s/ Dentist and provided vaccines to youth in the nearby small mountainous villages.  A few years later he visited a village of Angotere  Secoya indigenous people in Peru who live near the Colombian and Ecuadorian border with a Spanish Jesuit Missionary Luis Uriarte. That initial visit led to Steve living with the Angotere Secoya community on the Santa Maria River for 9 months in 1978 where he lived with a family and studied the diet and medicinal plant use in this community of 35 people. Shortly after that field research he met Tim Plowman at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Tim sent him to visit Dr. Schultes at Harvard on his way back College of the College of the Atlantic where was earning his BA in Human Ecology.  After earning is degree, he spent a year traveling in Peru and Bolivia working with friends and colleagues as an Ethnobotanist for hire looking at Andean Tuber Crops, returning to visit the Secoya people and other wanderings.

He was then accepted as the first Fellowship student at the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden studying with Ian Prance, Mike Balick and colleagues in the Institute of Economic Botany. He conducted field work in the Andean and Amazon regions. He did his PhD research on Andean Tubers Crop complex. He then was hired by the National Academy of Sciences as part of the Board of Agriculture Committee on Managing Global Genetic Resources. He was then hired as the Chief Botanist for Latin America at the Nature Conservancy but met Lisa Conte who invited him to help start Shaman Pharmaceuticals along with Dennis, Mike Tempest. 

35 Years later he is the Chief of Sustainable Supply, Ethnobotanical Research, and IP at Jaguar Health, where he focusing on the integration of traditional ethnomedical knowledge and the development of  novel therapeutics. He has focused on reciprocity with local collaborating communities and the conservation of biocultural Diversity. Over theses 3.5 decades he dedicated himself to the sustainable harvest and management of the miraculous Croton lechleri tree, also known as the Dragon's Blood tree, found in the Amazon rain forest. Steve’s efforts have been crucial in developing Crofelemer from this tree into an innovative plant-based prescription medication, which is the first FDA-approved oral Botanical drug. He has also focused his research and collaborations with local and Indigenous communities in various regions, including Africa and South East Asia with a focus on the conservation of biocultural diversity.  Most recently he and many ethnobotanical colleagues who were scientific strategy team advisors to  Shaman, formed the Entheogen Therapeutics Initiative (ETI) that has led to the formation of Magdalena Biosciences, a joint venture between Jaguar/ETI and Filament Health in Vancouver, Canada.