Early Life and Education
Dennis Jon McKenna was born on December 17, 1950, in Paonia, Colorado---the same small western Colorado town where his older brother Terence had been born four years earlier. Like Terence, Dennis developed an early interest in the natural world, but his temperament leaned more toward systematic scientific inquiry than visionary speculation.
After high school, Dennis pursued a rigorous academic path in the botanical sciences. He earned his master's degree in botany from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1979, with a thesis focused on the pharmacology of ayahuasca. He then completed his doctorate in botanical sciences at the University of British Columbia in 1984, writing a dissertation titled Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors in Amazonian Hallucinogenic Plants: Ethnobotanical, Phytochemical, and Pharmacological Investigations---one of the earliest comprehensive scientific studies of ayahuasca's pharmacology.
