In the late 90s, Chris Jenks was working on his doctorate degree in organic chemistry at the University of California, Davis. Discouraged by the conventional career opportunities available to chemists, Chris was looking for a way to use his training that could really help people. That was when he discovered the work that Howard Lotsof and his contemporaries were doing with ibogaine. After compiling the available scientific literature on ibogaine, Chris traveled to France and Italy to develop and publish a procedure to extract total alkaloid (TA) and purified total alkaloid (PTA HCl) from iboga root bark.

Years later, when the hope of widespread iboga cultivation had not materialized and iboga was becoming ever more endangered, Chris made several journeys to South Africa, along with his family, to develop an economical, low-tech process for manufacturing ibogaine hydrochloride from bark of the widely cultivated Voacanga africana tree. The process, recently featured on Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, is intended to be understandable to a lay audience so that anyone sufficiently motivated and dedicated, and having modest resources, could master it. Chris shares the hope of the Lotsofs that ibogaine will someday be available throughout the world to anyone seeking to benefit from its life-saving and life-changing properties.