RIP Dr. Albert Hoffmann

[Chalupa]

http://www.hofmann.org/

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Dr. Albert Hofmann

Dr. Albert Hofmann

For the American artist, see Albert Hoffman

Dr. Albert Hofmann (born January 11, 1906) is a prominent Swiss scientist and best known as the "father" of LSD. He was born in Baden, Switzerland, and studied chemistry at the University of Zurich. His main interest was the chemistry of plants and animals, and he later conducted important research regarding the chemical structure of the common animal substance chitin, for which he received his doctorate. Hofmann joined the pharmaceutical-chemical department of Sandoz Laboratories, Basel (now Novartis), studying the medicinal plants squill and ergot as part of a program to purify and synthesize active constituents for use as pharmaceuticals.

His research in lysergic acid, the central shared component of ergot alkaloids, eventually led to the synthesis of LSD-25 in 1938. It was five years later, on repeating synthesis of the almost forgotten substance, that Dr. Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD after accidentally ingesting some through his fingertips on April 16, 1943. Three days later, on April 19 (later known as Bicycle Day), Hofmann deliberately consumed 250 µg of LSD, and experienced far more intense effects (see: LSD for details). This was followed by a series of self-experiments conducted by Hofmann and his colleagues. He first wrote about these experiments on April 22.

He became director of the natural products department at Sandoz and went on studying hallucinogenic substances found in Mexican mushrooms and other plants used by the aboriginal people. This led to the synthesis of psilocybin, the active agent of many "magic mushrooms".

Hofmann also got interested in the seeds of the Mexican magic morning glory species Rivea corymbosa, the seeds of which are called Ololiuhqui by the natives. He was very surprised to find the active compound of Ololiuhqui chemically very similar to LSD.

In 1962, he and his wife Anita travelled to southern Mexico to search for the magic plant ska Maria Pastora (leaves of Mary the shepherdess), later known as Salvia divinorum. He was able to obtain samples of this plant but never succeeded in identifying its active chemicals.

He calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He concedes LSD can be dangerous and calls its promotion by Timothy Leary and others "a crime." [1]

He has been the author of over 100 scientific articles and has written (or co-written) a number of books, including LSD, My Problem Child, which is partly an autobiography and describes his famous bicycle ride.

On the occasion of his 100th birthday on January 11, 2006, he was the focus of an international symposium and media attention for his discovery of LSD.

Edited April 30, 2008 by The Magnificent Goldberg
Title change

[Jazzmoose]

Ah, this brings back flashba....er, memories...

[brownie]

Dr. Hoffman's secret of longetivity: eggs for breakfast!

From Reuters:

SECRET OF LONGEVITY EGGS NOT LSD: DISCOVERER

(Reuters)

The 100-year-old Swiss chemist who discovered the psychedelic drug LSD said on Friday the secret to his longevity was the eggs he eats for breakfast and not the mind-bending drug.

Albert Hofmann, who celebrated his centenary on Wednesday, rejected the idea that the drug had prolonged his life, despite taking his first trip in the mid-1940s and his last just three years ago.

Instead, Hofmann revealed the secret of his longevity was the two raw eggs he eats with his muesli for breakfast.

"In an egg there is everything a being needs to develop -- vitamins, minerals and hormones," he said.

Hofmann attended the first day of a weekend symposium in Basel on Friday, organized by a non-profit making group which promotes research into psychedelic drugs and wants to prompt a debate on whether LSD could have a clinical use again.

Although best known as a recreational drug, LSD was used in the United States as a psychotherapy treatment in the 1950s before it was banned by the U.S. government.

Scientists at the U.S.-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies are investigating new uses such as LSD's effects on so-called cluster headaches -- a painful rare condition similar to a migraine.

"It is still my problem child," Hofmann said. "But very often they turn into wonder children. I hope that it can be possible in time for LSD to find the place in society that it deserves."

At his centenary celebrations on Wednesday, Hofmann put his name to an appeal launched by the symposium's organizers to legalize the drug for clinical and scientific use, which will be lodged with authorities in Europe and the United States.

[JSngry]

Eggs and acid are natural enemies.

Don't ask me how I know. I just do.

[Randy Twizzle]

Here's Dr Hoffman with some fellow researchers.

[Johnny E]

Here's to the next 100 years Dr. Hoffman!

[rostasi]

excerpt from "Everything You Know is Wrong" by The Firesign Theatre:

The General's Comments on How To Deal With Alien Contact

(The General): "Honey and men- I have something awesome to reveal to you."

(The Colonel): "Well, go ahead, sir."

(General's Wife): "Go ahead."

(The General): "Two flying saucers have just landed on my plate."

(Long moment of silence)

(The Colonel): "Well, turn away sir - I'll eat them."

(Nervous laughter)

(Sound of a spoon repeatedly striking a water glass)

(The General): "Men - our greatest fear is realized - we are under attack from superior consciousness."

(The Colonel): "The eggs, sir?"

(The General): "They're only the beginning."

(More nervous laughter)

(Another Officer): "Can I have some more of those flapjacks?"

(The General): "All right, men - questions? Questions?"

(The Major): "Ah, sir?"

(The General): "Yes, Major?"

(The Major): "Ah, pass the ah, syrup, General?"

(The General): "That's a good idea, Chuck, but syrup won't stop 'em!"

(Another Officer): "But, sir..."

(The Colonel): "Ah, sir?"

(The General): "Colonel?"

(The Colonel): "Are you nuts?"

(The General): "H-Hmmm! That is just exactly what they want you to believe! (chuckle)"

(The Colonel): "The eggs, sir?"

(The General): "Let's just call them 'the phenomena' "

(The Colonel): "Well, if I may respectfully submit, sir, I think you've got your phenomena

scrambled, General."

(More nervous laughter)

(General's Wife): "What about my eggs, dear?"

(The General): "Honey - they're in everybody's eggs!"

[Chalupa]

Rest In Peace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann

[7/4]

Albert Hofmann, 102; Chemist Discovered LSD

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, April 30, 2008; B07

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 (LSD), 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, the 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 in Orient, 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, the son of a toolmaker, was born Jan. 11, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland. He was the oldest of four children, and after his father 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 joined the pharmaceutical-chemical firm Sandoz (now Novartis) in Basel.

Among his early accomplishments was the synthesis of an alkaloid that prompted uterine contractions in order 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 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 both mescaline and LSD while corresponding with Huxley in 1956.

Dr. Hofmann later 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 the 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.

According to Dr. Hofmann, Leary replied 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, called "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.

[Chalupa]

Man, 102. That's incredible.

[Niko]

He described meeting Leary in September 1971 at the 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.

According to Dr. Hofmann, Leary replied 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."

oh ... guess it will take me another ten years to understand

[Joe G]

[7/4]

Dr. Hofmann, date unknown, with a chemical model of LSD.

April 30, 2008

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102

By CRAIG S. SMITH, NYT

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.”

Albert Hofmann in 2006.

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.”

[7/4]

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.”

Bike

Pink Floyd

I've got a bike

You can ride it if you like

It's got a basket

A bell that rings

And things to make it look good

I'd give it to you if I could

But I borrowed it

You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world

I'll give you anything

Everything if you want things

I've got a cloak

It's a bit of a joke

There's a tear up the front

It's red and black

I've had it for months

If you think it could look good

Then I guess it should

You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world

I'll give you anything

Everything if you want things

I know a mouse

And he hasn't got a house

I don't know why

I call him Gerald

He's getting rather old

But he's a good mouse

You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world

I'll give you anything

Everything if you want things

I've got a clan of gingerbread men

Here a man

There a man

Lots of gingerbread men

Take a couple if you wish

They're on the dish

You're the kind of girl that fits in with my world

I'll give you anything

Everything if you want things

I know a room full of musical tunes

Some rhyme

Some ching

Most of them are clockwork

Let's go into the other room and make them work

[7/4]

[7/4]

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Hm, yes, OK. His house was a bit garish, wasn't it? Or was the cameraman on LSD?

MG

[BruceH]

Trippy.

[Shrdlu]

Did he make anything useful, lol?

[Teasing the Korean]

First, we lost Dr. Samuel Hoffman, podiatrist and theremin player (who played on soundtracks by Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, and records by The Great Les Baxter).

Then, we lost Dr. Julia Hoffman, a.k.a Grayson Hall, of Dark Shadows fame.

And now this.

What is it about doctors named Hoffman?

[Chalupa]

First, we lost Dr. Samuel Hoffman, podiatrist and theremin player (who played on soundtracks by Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, and records by The Great Les Baxter).

Then, we lost Dr. Julia Hoffman, a.k.a Grayson Hall, of Dark Shadows fame.

And now this.

What is it about doctors named Hoffman?

Good one. You should post that in the "Name Three People" thread.

[mgraham333]

Why do the posts on the Steve Hoffman forum seem more LSD-induced than those on the Albert Hoffmann forum....

[porcy62]

Did he make anything useful, lol?

Yep, thanks to him I met HIM once, unfortunately just after our first meeting the atheists banned LSD and I became one of them

Dr. Hofmann’s work produced other important drugs, including methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause of death from childbirth.

Peace

[porcy62]

Why do the posts on the Steve Hoffman forum seem more LSD-induced than those on the Albert Hoffmann forum....

Well... comparing 200 different remasterings/pressings of "Hotel California" should have the very same effects: bad trips IMHO.

[sidewinder]

Yep, thanks to him I met HIM once

Hank?

Edited May 1, 2008 by sidewinder