J. G. Soares Maia

J. G. Soares Maia, also cited as José Guilherme Soares Maia, is a Brazilian chemist whose work belongs to the development of natural-products chemistry in Amazonian research institutions. In the 1970s he was affiliated with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, where chemistry, botany, and ethnobotanical collection increasingly overlapped.

The 1974 article co-authored with William Antônio Rodrigues is short but useful: it connects herbarium comparison, chromatography, infrared spectroscopy, and ultraviolet spectroscopy to Indigenous Yomanê preparations from the Tototobi River region. Its focus is not visionary narrative but the chemical confirmation of Virola theiodora as both hallucinogenic snuff and arrow poison.

For the archive, Maia's work helps represent a Brazilian scientific literature on Amazonian psychoactive plants, distinct from the better-known North American and European ethnobotanical writings that often cite the same materials from afar.