Peter Gorman's love affair with the Amazon jungle is well-known to people in the field. Since 1984, Mr. Gorman has spent a minimum of three months annually there generally using Iquitos, Peru as his base. During that time he has studied ayahuasca, the visionary healing vine of the jungle, with his friend, the curandero Julio Jerena, as well as San Pedro with Victor Estrada in the Peru’s highlands.    

To do his work in Peru, over the years Peter Gorman has rebuilt several boats, traveled thousands of miles of jungle waterways, hiked across the Peruvian jungle on numerous occasions, suffered from malaria and a botfly infestation, been bitten by ants, rats, spiders, vampire bats and other scary things, and generally had a rollicking good time with it all.
   

He has collected artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History, botanical specimens for Shaman Pharmaceuticals and herpetological specimens for the FIDIA Research Institute of the University of Rome.  His description of the indiginous Matses Indians’ use of the secretions of the phyllomedusa bicolor frog has opened an entire field devoted to the use of amphibian peptides as potential medicines in Western medicine.