Obituary: Albert Hofmann - chemist who discovered LSD

Thursday, May 01, 2008

It brought some of its users to a mental breakdown. The Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary urged the flower-power generation to "turn on, tune in and drop out" and was sacked for his efforts.

LSD was taken up by the writers Ken Kesey and Aldous Huxley, who took it on his deathbed. It inspired a generation of musicians including Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd; The Beatles sang about it on Sgt Pepper and Revolver; Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead experimented with it; Cary Grant claimed to be born again after taking it. Hofmann welcomed every ounce of celebrity endorsement he got.

Hofmann was a synthetic chemist working for the Sandoz drug company in Basel, Switzerland – now part of Novartis – and was studying ergot, a toxic and highly complex mixture of toxins produced by a fungal disease of rye and barley. Ergot had already produced a range of physiological substances. Historically, midwives used tiny amounts of it to induce labour, and later it was used to treat migraine.

From the late 1930s Hofmann was systematically making LSD derivatives that might have medicinal use; the chemical had a similar structure to coramine, a now-obsolete drug that stimulated the heart and lungs. He tested LSD on rodents. It was not toxic and it had no effect on their circulation or breathing, though it made them more restless.

On a Friday afternoon in April 1943, shortly after synthesising a new batch of LSD, he felt restless and dizzy and decided to go home. When he got there he lay down, felling pleasantly intoxicated and with his imagination in overdrive. "In a dreamlike state I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours." This lasted for two hours and then faded away. He didn't know what had caused it, suspected it was something he had handled in the lab, and was certain it was important.

Next Monday morning he took what he presumed to be a tiny dose of LSD, intending to take progressive increases until he found the active dose. He was surprised to find he was on his first acid trip. He went home early, using his usual method of transport, a bicycle. While he was cycling he felt that time was standing still. "Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror."

In his memoir, LSD, My Problem Child (1979) he described how, when he arrived home, the furnishings had transformed themselves into terrifying objects. "They were in constant motion, animated as if driven by an inner restlessness." He asked the lady next door for a glass of milk, hoping it would mop up the drug. She became "a malevolent insidious witch with a coloured mask". He sent for the doctor, who found nothing wrong with him.

Six hours later the experience changed. He began to see "a wonderful play of colours and forms, which it really was a pleasure to observe". Then he went to sleep and woke so refreshed that he felt reborn. That day, 19 April, is now celebrated by LSD enthusiasts as "Bicycle Day".

Two technicians then took 20 per cent of the dose Hofmann had tried and had powerful experiences. LSD proved to be 1,000 times more potent than mescaline, the most famous psychedelic drug up until then, and the subject of Aldous Huxley's 1954 book The Doors of Perception.

Sandoz managers initially decided the drug had no medicinal uses but later marketed it under the trade name Delysid in the late 1940s. It remained a prescription drug for 20 years for all manner of emotional and addictive disorders. It has been the subject of 3,000 research papers and enjoyed a vogue among avant-garde psychoanalysts.

In the 1960s LSD was discovered by Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist, who told the world the drug provided a path to spiritual enlightenment, and it became widely used recreationally. Dr Andrew Herxheimer, former editor of Britain's Drug and T herapeutics Bulletin, said, "It was almost magical – perhaps it made things more magical, or perhaps it demystified them." LSD was banned in the United States and Britain in 1966, and in most other countries soon afterwards.

In his work as a chemist, Hofmann made a serious contribution to therapeutics by synthesising several drugs: hydergine, which improves circulation and brain function in the elderly; methergine, which reduces bleeding after childbirth; and dihydergot, used to stabilise circulation and blood pressure. He also identified and synthesised the active ingredient of peyote mushrooms and the active ingredient of morning glory, a Mexican climbing flower that closes its flowers at noon.

Albert Hofmann was born in rural Switzerland, the son of a toolmaker. He studied chemistry at Zurich University, and did his doctoral thesis in chitin, the hard substance that forms insect skeletons. He then went to work for Sandoz, who asked him to study and separate the medicinal compounds in ergot.

LSD was tested by the US military as a truth drug, but was found to be ineffective. The CIA allegedly tried to slip some into Fidel Castro's drinking water before he made a television broadcast, and the British government allegedly gave it to servicemen, telling them it was a potential cure for the common cold, so that they could see its effects. It was also proposed as a way of inducing schizophrenia experimentally, so that cures could be tested against it, but this never caught on.

Hofmann became something of a mystic, but still had his feet on the ground sufficiently to become head of chemical and pharmaceutical research at Sandoz. He was philosophical about the rise and fall of LSD and recalled his use of it with enjoyment. He wrote several books including Insight Outlook (about mysticism, 1990), Plants of the Gods: origins of hallucinogenic use (1979, with Richard Evans Schultes), and Hofmann's Elixir: LSD and the new Eleuthis, which is due to be published this year.

In 2006, some 2,000 scientists gathered to celebrate Hofmann's 100th birthday at a symposium in Basel addressed by the Swiss president Moritz Leuenberger. Hofmann lived in retirement in rural Switzerland and attributed his long life to eating a raw egg every day.

Albert Hofmann, chemist: born Baden, Switzerland 11 January 1906; married (two sons, one daughter, and one son deceased); died Burg, Switzerland 30 April 2008.

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