The life and work of Richard Evans Schultes—teacher, mentor and friend—resulted in a most extraordinary legacy that impacted an entire academic discipline as well as the tropical rainforest, where he spent so much of his time. His life and times have been brilliantly chronicled by Wade Davis in the biography One River: Exploration and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (1997). At this, the tenth anniversary of his passing in 2001, we celebrate, with this symposium, his life and academic contributions. Professor Schultes, as his students always called him with such great reverence, was a founder of The Society for Economic Botany in 1959 and edited our journal for 18 years, from 1962–1979. His multidisciplinary scientific research program began in 1936 with that well-known trip to Oklahoma and lasted far beyond his retirement from Harvard in 1985. Professor Schultes’ mentorship of dozens of Ph.D. students during his career at Harvard, combined with his teaching, lecturing, and inspiration of tens of thousands of students throughout his long and distinguished career, did much to influence the trajectory of ethnobotany and economic botany. His academic philosophy and values were heavily influenced by his mentor, Oakes Ames. These values are deeply infused in the lives and professional activities of his numerous students, as can be seen from the presentations in this symposium.