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Inventor of LSD is Dead. Albert Hofmann the inventor of the chemical that changed a generation is dead. The Economist had a good biography of the man.
HIS first experience was “rather agreeable”. As he worked in the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel in Switzerland on April 16th 1943, isolating and synthesising the unstable alkaloids of the ergot fungus, Albert Hofmann began to feel a slight lightheadedness. He could not think why. His lab was shared with two other chemists; frugality and company had taught him careful habits. And this was a man whose doctoral thesis had revolved around the gastrointestinal juices of the vineyard snail.
Perhaps, he supposed, he had inhaled the fumes of the solvent he was using. In any event, he took himself home and lay down on the sofa. There the world exploded, dissolving into a kaleidoscope of colours, shapes, spirals and light. It seemed to have something to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD-25, the substance he had been working on. He had synthesised it five years before, but had found it “uninteresting” and stopped. Now, like some prince in faery, he had got the stuff on his fingertips, rubbed it into his eyes and seen the secrets of the universe.
The next Monday, ever the good scientist, he deliberately took 0.25 milligrams of LSD diluted with 10cc of water. It tasted of nothing. But by 5 o'clock the lab was distorting, and his limbs were stiffening. The last words he managed to scrawl in his lab journal were “desire to laugh”. That desire soon left him. As he cycled home with a companion, perhaps the most famous bike ride in history, he had no idea he was moving. But in his house the furniture was ghoulishly mutating and spinning, and the neighbour who brought him milk as an antidote was “a witch with a coloured mask”. He realised now that LSD was the devil he couldn't shake off, though in his senseless body he screamed and writhed on the sofa, certain that he was dying.
Albert Hofman suggested people could get many of the effects of acid without taking it:
Without it, however, Mr Hofmann knew it was still possible to get to the same place. As a child, wandering in May on a forest path above Baden in a year he had forgotten, he had suddenly been filled with such a sense of the radiance and oneness of creation that he thought the vision would last for ever. “Miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality” had ambushed him elsewhere, too: the wind in a field of yellow chrysanthemums, leaves in the sunlit garden after a shower of rain. When he had drunk LSD in solution on that fateful April afternoon he had recovered those insights, but had not surpassed them. His advice to would-be trippers, therefore, was simple. “Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!”
Read Albert Hofmann on Economist.com.