All students participating in the program took a special spring-semester course, taught by Scott and visiting experts. It combined microbiology, pharmacology, plant science, ethnobotany (the study of plants in human culture), conservation, and intellectual-property law. After researching the indigenous plants and the culture of the Amazon, each student—and two graduate student teaching assistants—defined a theme that would guide his or her plant collection during the expedition. One student collected plants native peoples use to treat tuberculosis infections; another opted for plants likely to produce antioxidants. One aspiring scientist targeted carnivorous plants, while another sought plants used to treat wounds. Vekhter's iboga-tree extracts appealed to him because of their reputed properties for battling opioid addiction. "From a societal point of view," he says, "it would be great if one of our plants had value. That's something everyone in the class cares about."

While many of their friends headed for spring-break beaches or home, the Yale undergraduates left their world behind. They voyaged to a place in the upper Amazon basin still largely free from the developed world's intervention. "It was one of the most remote places you can get to," says Ma. They hiked into an undisturbed, primeval forest with plenty to keep them on their toes: along with the biting bugs, he recalls walking past a small but potentially deadly pit viper, a venomous snake known as a fer-de-lance. He also witnessed a giant otter snagging and making a meal of a piranha. "It was amazing," he says.

Gary knows many of the world's rainforests intimately, yet even his knowledge counted as cursory within the overwhelming natural diversity and dense growth the group encountered. "It's not like going to a garden and picking flowers," he says. To scout out their plants within the seemingly impenetrable tangle, they relied on a guide, Percy Núñez, an Amazon-basin native and professional field biologist from Peru's National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco with an encyclopedic knowledge of tropical botany.

Shouts of "I found my plant!" or calls over the walkie-talkie of "We found your plant!" came frequently as the students spied their prey, recalls Strobel. They used machetes and plastic bags to cut and collect small stems and leaves.

Most specimens had to be collected from upper portions of plants, where endophytes are more likely to be found in abundance and less likely to be contaminated by soil microbes. Hence, Vekhter's high climb up the iboga tree—where he did find the endophytes he was after. Other students collected samples from high branches using clippers attached to long poles. "The way Scott is making us get our scientific chops is really unique for undergraduates," Vekhter says of their adventures.

By the end of the two weeks, the students had found more than half the plants on their lists. For Gary Strobel, it was his most fruitful bioprospecting trip ever. The group returned to Yale with samples of around 300 plant species, many of which he had never seen before. All became reference species in the Yale University Herbarium, one of the nation's oldest and most extensive plant-specimen collections, and in Núñez's herbarium at the university in Cusco.

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