The lover of Apollo

One day long ago a man lay dying in the Amazon rainforest. He had malaria and had found his way to the bank of a tributary to be near the cool water. Racked by fever, he looked up and saw a little blue flower. It seemed like a hallucination, because he had been searching for it for so long. That little blue flower had only been seen a handful of times by less than a handful of people, and he had searched until his body broke and he was near death. And now above his head near the river, there it was growing on a tree. He was so happy to see the flower that it pulled him right back into the world, and he did not die that day.

Now anyone can order that flower on the Internet and grow it on their kitchen counter, just to throw it away after it blooms. There was a time when a man would spend years of his life, risk death and often die for a flower.

That flower was the small blue orchid, Aganisia cyanea, named after the lover of the god Apollo.
And the man whose life was saved by that little flower was Richard Evans Schultes.

You would know much less about a lot of things if it weren't for that man.
Schultes was driven to explore by that flower.
Schultes introduced the Amazon rainforest to the rest of the world.
He was not motivated by gold or treasure.
All he wanted was that flower--and he found it, and it saved his life.
Through his adventures Schultes gave science and medicine a lot along the way.

In a way, you owe a lot to that little flower.

Richard Evans Schultes in the Amazon