Don't do drugs!: This guy may have just seen Lucy in the sky with diamonds!
Courtesy Mark RyanDr. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) died yesterday at his home in Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

Hofmann was working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals (now Novartis) when he first synthesized LSD-25 in 1938. However, he set it aside and didn’t stumble upon its hallucinogenic powers until 5 years later, when, while synthesizing a new batch for study, he accidentally ingested some of it from his fingertips.

Once that genie was let out of the bottle, Hofmann went whole-hog investigating the drug’s possibilities, doing many experiments on himself and his colleagues.

He later became director of Sandoz’s natural products department studying other natural mind-altering substances, such as those found in Mexican mushrooms (psilocybin) and in the seeds of the morning glory species Rivea corymbosa (lysergic acid amide).

Hofmann referred to LSD as “medicine for the soul” and spent much of his life trying to convince others of its medicinal and therapeutic value, although he admitted it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. The drug was made illegal after a rise in popularity by counterculture youth during the 1960s.

"I produced the substance as a medicine,” he once said. “It's not my fault if people abused it.”

LINKS

Associated Press story
Albert Hofmann link on Wikipedia
More on LSD

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