[THS] Washington Post & NYT: Albert Hofmann, 102

[Peter Webster]

Pubdate: Wed, 30 Apr 2008
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: B07
Copyright: 2008 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letters at washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Albert+Hofmann

ALBERT HOFMANN, 102; CHEMIST DISCOVERED LSD

Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who 
came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered 
in 1938 as his "problem child," died April 29 at his home in Burg, a 
village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack.

His death was confirmed by Rick Doblin, the Boston-based founder of 
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a 
nonprofit pharmaceutical company developing LSD and other 
psychedelics for prescription medicines.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, thousands of times stronger than 
mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as 
psychedelic -- a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with 
color and movement.

After its discovery, LSD was viewed as a wonder drug with the 
potential to treat problems including schizophrenia and alcoholism. 
For the latter, some held the theory that chronic drinkers quit only 
after experiencing the hallucinations of delirium tremens.

LSD attracted many prominent advocates. They included Aldous Huxley, 
author of "Brave New World," and psychologist Timothy Leary, who saw 
the drug as a potent way for people to live up to his 1960s 
counterculture motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The CIA was also widely reported to have used LSD in experiments on 
unwitting subjects. This, and greater recreational use that caused 
some fatal overdoses, led to the widespread condemnation of the drug 
and, by the early 1970s, its criminalization. As a result, research 
permission and funding from state and federal agencies was terminated.

In Dr. Hofmann's opinion, outlawing LSD made its use even more 
attractive to young people and diminished any safeguards. He spoke of 
many hippies stopping by his home on the way to their spiritual 
quest, hoping to score from his "secret stash."

Dr. Hofmann came across LSD while working on medicinal uses of a 
fungus to act as a circulatory heart-lung stimulant. His first LSD 
"trip" occurred in 1943, a troubling experience that led him to write 
in his journal, "A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my 
body, mind and soul."

Dr. Hofmann remained wary of LSD's recreational uses as well as its 
portrayal in the media.

"I was not surprised that it became a ritual drug in the youth 
anti-establishment movement, but I was shocked by irresponsible use 
that resulted in mental catastrophes," he told Playboy magazine in 
2006. "That's what gave the health authorities a pretext for totally 
prohibiting its production, possession and use."

Albert Hofmann was born Jan. 11, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland. He was 
the oldest of four children, and after his father, a toolmaker, fell 
seriously ill, he was forced as a teenager to seek a commercial 
apprenticeship to support the family.

While learning a trade, he continued his private schooling with 
financial help from his godfather. In 1930, he received a doctorate 
from the University of Zurich, where he studied the chemistry of 
plants and animals, and he joined the pharmaceutical-chemical firm 
Sandoz (now Novartis) in Basel.

Among his early accomplishments was the synthesis of an alkaloid that 
prompted uterine contractions to stop postpartum bleeding.

In 1938, he was exploring a circulatory heart-lung stimulant when he 
happened on LSD-25 while conducting purification and crystallization 
experiments on the fungus ergot, which grows on rye. Ergot had been 
long used to induce childbirth.

Lysergic acid is an active part of therapeutically essential ergot 
alkaloids, and Dr. Hofmann began combining it with other molecules 
for his research.

At the time, LSD showed little effect on lab animals besides some 
agitation. It was shelved for five years until he, on a hunch, 
repeated the experiment to help him with another medical study.

Having unknowingly absorbed some of the compound, he experienced a 
dizzying sensation that also made him restless.

He wrote in a journal about this first known encounter: "At home I 
lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, 
characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.

"In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be 
unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of 
fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic 
play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away."

Three days later, April 19, he bicycled home after consuming 250 
micrograms of LSD in a now-famous "trip" that has become known as 
Bicycle Day. The route he took home was later named in his honor.

That time, he said, he felt some of the darker symptoms of the drug: 
a feeling of impending death, of possession by the devil, of feeling 
violently threatened by family and neighbors. Above all, he wrote, "I 
was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane."

As he continued to study the drug, Dr. Hofmann struck up a 
correspondence with German novelist Ernst Junger, who had 
experimented with mescaline. At Dr. Hofmann's home in 1951, the 
scientist administered .05 of a milligram of LSD to Junger and 
himself as they were surrounded by violet roses, Japanese incense and 
a Mozart concerto for flute and harp.

"Ernst Junger enjoyed the color display of oriental images," he later 
wrote. "I was on a trip among Berber tribes in North Africa, saw 
colored caravans and lush oases."

Further controlled experimentation by University of Zurich scientists 
on humans subjects -- some with psychiatric problems -- showed a 
similar calming reaction. This led Sandoz to manufacture LSD under 
the trade name Delysid by the late 1940s.

It entered the U.S. market and, during the next two decades, LSD was 
intensely researched as a drug to treat all manner of emotional and 
addictive disorders. Humphry F. Osmond, a British-born psychiatrist, 
introduced the word "psychedelic" to describe the effects of 
mescaline and LSD while corresponding with Huxley in 1956.

Dr. Hofmann wrote in a 1980 book, "LSD, My Problem Child," that LSD 
brought him the "same happiness and gratification that any 
pharmaceutical chemist would feel on learning that a substance he or 
she produced might possibly develop into a valuable medicament."

But he said he was increasingly disturbed by a "huge wave of an 
inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above 
all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. . . . The more 
[LSD's] use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in 
the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically 
unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for 
the Sandoz firm."

He described meeting Leary in September 1971 at a railway station 
snack bar in Lausanne; Leary was living in Switzerland. He said they 
had a cordial but strong exchange of words in which Dr. Hofmann 
criticized Leary's self-promotion and his "propagation of LSD use" 
among impressionable young people.

Dr. Hofmann said that Leary said that American teenagers "with regard 
to information and life experience, were comparable to adult 
Europeans. . . . For that reason, he deemed the LSD experience 
significant, useful, and enriching, even for people still very young in years."

Dr. Hofmann headed the research department for natural medicines at 
Sandoz before retiring in 1971. At the company in the 1950s and 
1960s, he discovered and named many of the active hallucinogenic 
ingredients in Mexican "magic mushrooms," including psilocybin and 
psilocin. He was credited with important developments in medications 
for geriatric and gynecological uses as well as drugs to control 
blood pressure.

He was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee and a fellow of the 
World Academy of Sciences. He was a prolific writer of scientific 
articles and the author of several books, many of which tried to bind 
the scientific with the spiritual. In particular, he denounced the 
demonization of LSD after hippies and societal dropouts seemed to 
have monopolized the media's focus.

In his 1989 book "Insight Outlook," he wrote that LSD taken by 
"mentally stable persons in the right set and setting" was suited to 
the Western world, which he saw rife with "materialism, estrangement 
from nature, . . . [and] the missing of a sense-making philosophical 
fundamentalness of life."

His 100th birthday was celebrated in Basel as a referendum on his 
greatest discovery. He attended the conference, "LSD: Problem Child 
and Wonder Drug," and told one reporter that it was his daily diet of 
a raw egg that kept him spry, not, as many LSD enthusiasts suspected, 
his long-ago experiments.

His wife of more than 70 years, Anita Hofmann, died in December. One 
son died years earlier.

Survivors include three children. 
____________________________________________________________

Pubdate: Wed, 30 Apr 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact: letters at nytimes.com
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Craig S. Smith
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Albert+Hofmann

ALBERT HOFMANN, THE FATHER OF LSD, DIES AT 102

PARIS -- Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the 
world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died 
Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president 
of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a 
California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann's 1979 
book "LSD: My Problem Child."

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide 
in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until 
five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that 
became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and 
potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More 
important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was 
the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and 
understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That 
perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious 
epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and 
professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on 
Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no 
higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family 
lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his 
childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of 
a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. "It was a real paradise up there," he 
said in an interview in 2006. "We had no money, but I had a wonderful 
childhood."

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

"It happened on a May morning -- I have forgotten the year -- but I 
can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path 
on Martinsberg above Baden," he wrote in "LSD: My Problem Child." "As 
I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song 
and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an 
uncommonly clear light.

"It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as 
though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an 
indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security."

Though Dr. Hofmann's father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a 
Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized 
religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke 
to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. "I said that I didn't 
believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and 
someone made the world," he said. "I had this very deep connection 
with nature."

Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because, 
he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where 
energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there 
in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz 
Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to 
synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.

It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye 
kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of 
the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced 
an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had 
experienced as a child.

On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and 
rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him. 
That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as 
"bicycle day."

Dr. Hofmann's work produced other important drugs, including 
methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause 
of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career 
and his spiritual quest.

"Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became 
aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of 
the animal and plant kingdom," Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist 
Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. "I became very sensitive 
to what will happen to all this and all of us."

Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and 
argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could 
be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind's place in nature and 
help curb society's ultimately self-destructive degradation of the 
natural world.

But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for 
entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that 
primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are 
ingested with care and spiritual intent.

After his discovery of LSD's properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years 
researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he 
participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern 
Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the 
Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin. 
He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which 
the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical 
structure was close to that of LSD.

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with 
such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and 
Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an 
injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.

Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann 
remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz 
as head of the research department for natural medicines until his 
retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and 
was the author or co-author of a number of books

He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in 
Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several 
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his 
hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding. 
"Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In 
death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was 
before I was born, that's all." 
_____________________________________________________________