http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magazine/28hofmann-t.html?_r=2&hp;

Albert Hofmann | b. 1906
Day Tripper

  By ROBERT STONE
Published: December 24, 2008

In the circles where LSD eventually thrived, the moment of its discovery was more
cherished than even the famous intersection of a fine English apple with Isaac
Newton’s inquiring mind, the comic cosmic instant that gave us gravity. According to
legend, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a research chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical
company, fell from his bicycle in April 1943 on his way home through the streets of
Basel, Switzerland, after accidently dosing himself with LSD at the laboratory. The
story presented another example of enlightenment as trickster. As a narrative it was
very fondly regarded because so many of us imagined a clueless botanist pedaling
over the cobblestones with the clockwork Helvetian order dissolving under him.

Drug Test Hofmann, right, cultivates mushrooms.

At Sandoz, Hofmann specialized in the investigation of naturally occurring compounds
that might make useful medicines. Among these was a rye fungus called ergot,
known principally as the cause of a grim disease called St. Anthony’s Fire, which
resulted in gangrene and convulsions. Ergot had one positive effect: in appropriate
doses it facilitated childbirth. Hofmann set out to find whether there might be further
therapeutic applications for ergot derivatives. Indeed, he discovered some for
Sandoz, including Hydergine, a medication that, among other things, enhances
memory function in the elderly. Most famously, of course, Hofmann’s ergot
experiments synthesized D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, LSD. On April 16, 1943,
he apparently absorbed a minuscule amount of the lysergic acid he was synthesizing
through his fingertips. He went home (he doesn’t say how) and subsequently
submitted a report to Sandoz. This reads in part:

“At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicatedlike condition,
characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.”

A few days later at work, Hofmann decided to adopt the Romantic methods of
Stevenson’s celebrated Dr. Jekyll. His experimental notes commence: ‘4/19/43 16:20
0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = .25 mg
tartrate.” By 1700 hours he was reporting other symptoms along with a “desire to
laugh.”

The laughter was Mr. Hyde’s, not Dr. Jekyll’s, because for most of this occasion
Hofmann was in the grip of what less cultivated experimenters would later call a
bummer.

“A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul. . . . It
was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will.”

Hofmann did make the journey home by bicycle, with the help of an assistant.
Contrary to legend, there is no record of his falling. As the hours of Hofmann’s
investigation passed, he felt progressively better. In the morning “everything
glistened and sparkled.”

On the basis of Hofmann’s report, three other officials of Sandoz sampled LSD. A
psychiatric researcher at the University of Zurich, Dr. Werner Stoll, repeated the
experiment, and Sandoz came to the conclusion that modified LSD-25 was a
psychotropic compound that was nontoxic and could have enormous use as a
psychiatric aid. A decision was made to make LSD available after the war to research
institutes and physicians as an experimental drug.

Hofmann was by no means a technocratic philistine. The amazing mystical elements
activated by this strange fungoid compound were of particular interest to him,
though he says he never imagined mere recreational inebriation as a goal for users.
He did, however, anticipate self-experimentation by “writers, painters, musicians and
other intellectuals.” By people, in other words, as respectably educated folk used to
say, “who possessed the background.”

How could Hofmann, swathed in the cultural Gemütlichkeit of Switzerland,
understand that shortly — in America in the ’60s — we were all, all of us, going to be
writers, painters, musicians and other intellectuals?

Actually Hofmann soon had his eye on America and its discontents. He associated
“abuse” of LSD with what he called “materialism, alienation from nature through
industrialization and increasing urbanization, lack of satisfaction . . . a mechanized,
lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, saturated society.”

Hofmann was a wise man, however, and no more judgmental than any scientist
should be, and in his writings on the subject he treats the hippie acid culture with
grandfatherly moderation. Meeting Timothy Leary, a figure who arguably turned his
magic medicine into a social threat, he remonstrated firmly with him, tried hard to
see Leary’s ineffable good points and afterward called him “a charming personage.”

As a highly valued executive researcher at Sandoz (now part of Novartis), he traveled
the world to study psychotropic compounds. With his wife he went to Mexico to
sample psychedelics at their practical source, as administered by the curanderos and
curanderas of the Sierra Mazateca. It was Hofmann who succeeded in synthesizing
psilocybin from the “magic mushroom” of the Mazatecas. He also isolated a
compound similar to LSD from another Native American botanic sacramental, the
ololiuhqui vine. As a scientist he was fascinated by the ritual practiced by the ancient
Greeks at Eleusis each fall. These rites, honoring the grain goddess Demeter,
celebrated antiquity’s most profound mystery cult. Initiates described an intense life-
changing experience in the course of the nighttime ceremonies. Hofmann believed
that one of the components of the sacred kykeon, the potion distributed to adepts,
was a barley extract containing ergot.

Hofmann was close to many of the artists and thinkers who shared his fascination
with varieties of perception. He corresponded with Aldous Huxley and was also a
friend of the German mystic and novelist Ernst Jünger. He came to know prominent
members of the American Beat generation, including Allen Ginsberg, whom he met in
California in 1977. Hofmann never approved of mass intoxication or drug use in
adolescence. Contrary to assertions, however, he did not regret his discovery. No
great scientist known to history can have been less fanatical or more serene. He was
always a humanist committed to the spirit.

Over his long life, Hofmann took LSD many times. He developed a personal mysticism
involving nature, for which he had a lifelong passion. One thing this very tolerant
man decried in the Western drive for facile satisfaction was an alienation from the
outdoors. The use of LSD made him more and more conscious of it. In nature he saw
“a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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