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Albert Hofmann: Chemist who discovered the mind-altering properties of LSD




* Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world
* Swiss discoverer of LSD dies, aged 102
* Dr Albert Hofmann: The father of LSD

A whole generation experienced psychedelic enlightenment thanks to Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide. His chemical induced a new genre of pop music, art, textiles and even wallpapers. 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.

Independent

Former Emmerdale Actor Dies

Actor Bernard Archard, one of television’s most familiar faces, has died. He was 91.

Born in London in 1916, he appeared in series such as Upstairs Downstairs, Rumpole of the Bailey, Krull and The Avengers. He starred in two Doctorr Who stories, Bragen in The Power of the Daleks and Marcus Scarman in Pyramids of Mars, and he played Leonard Kempinski in Emmerdale.

Archard also had an equally successful film career and played leading roles in The Village of the Damned, The Day of the Jackal, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and The Sea Wolves.

waveguide.co.uk

UK playwright Harold Pinter dies

Many of Pinter's plays are considered classics

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who had cancer, died on Christmas Eve aged 78.

He wrote more than 30 plays including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. His film scripts include The French Lieutenant's Woman.

His style was so distinctive, "Pinteresque" entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

His wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said: "He was a great, and it was a privilege to live with him for over 33 years."

He had been due to pick up an honorary degree earlier this month from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London but was forced to withdraw due to illness.

Political views

BBC Creative Director Alan Yentob told the BBC: "He was a unique figure in British theatre. He has dominated the theatre scene since the 1950s."

Michael Billington, Pinter's friend and biographer, said he was "devastated and saddened" by the news.

He told the BBC: "Harold had been ill for a very long time, but he had a titanic will and one imagined he would go on fighting.

"He was a fighter in the field of politics, he fought strenuously against American and British foreign policy, but also in his work you see this, there is a combative spirit in his work.

"He was a generous and loyal man and very attached to the people whom he sincerely liked."



Also an actor, poet, screenwriter and director, Pinter was known for his left-wing political views and was an outspoken critic of US and UK foreign policy.

Veteran politician Tony Benn said Pinter was a great figure on the political scene.

"His death will leave a huge gap that will be felt by the whole political spectrum," he said.

Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 and the citation said "in his plays he uncovers the precipice in everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

He was awarded a CBE in 1966, later turned down a knighthood and became a Companion of Honour, an exclusive award in the gift of the Sovereign, in 2002.

Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in 2002 and following treatment, announced that he was on the road to recovery.

Three years later, he announced that he had given up writing for the theatre in order to concentrate on political work.

A production of No Man's Land starring Michael Gambon and David Walliams is due to open at the Duke of Yorks theatre in London on Friday.
BBC

US singer Eartha Kitt dies at 81

American singer and actress Eartha Kitt has died at the age 81, a family friend has said.

Ms Kitt was said to have been suffering from cancer.

She was one of the few artists to be nominated in the Tony, Grammy and Emmy award categories and was a stalwart of the Manhattan cabaret scene.

She famously played Catwoman in the 1960s Batman television series and this century continued to perform regularly in theatre shows and concert halls.

Ms Kitt was blacklisted in the US in the late 1960s after speaking out against the Vietnam War at a White House function.

BBC

No Woman No Cry 'songwriter' dies

No Woman No Cry was based on the ghetto where both men lived

Vincent Ford, the songwriter credited with composing the Bob Marley reggae classic No Woman, No Cry has died in Jamaica. He was 68.

Ford lost both his legs to diabetes and died in hospital from complications caused by the disease, said a spokesman for the Bob Marley Foundation.

His smash hit appeared on Marley's 1974 Natty Dread album.

It was inspired by the Trench Town ghetto in Kingston where both men lived in the 1960s.

Some claim Marley wrote it himself but gave Ford the credit to help his friend support himself with the royalties.

Ford is also credited with three songs on Marley's 1976 album Rastaman Vibration.

Marley remains the most widely known and revered performer of reggae music, and is credited for helping spread Jamaican music to the worldwide audience.

He died of cancer in Miami in 1981, aged 36.
BBC

Dale Wasserman: Playwright who adapted 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' for the stage


The playwright Dale Wasserman adapted Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a Broadway play in 1963, and wrote the libretto for one of New York's biggest musical hits, Man of La Mancha, which opened in 1965 and ran for 2,329 performances.

Man of La Mancha's hit song, "The Impossible Dream", was one of those inspirational ballads which one either loves or loathes, its lyrics (by Joe Darion) inspired by a speech written by Wasserman for his original television drama, I, Don Quixote, in which Quixote says, "To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, and never to stop dreaming or fighting – this is man's privilege and the only life worth living." Wasserman also wrote the screenplay for the popular adventure movie The Vikings (1958), which starred Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.

The rights to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey's 1962 novel about rebellion in a mental hospital, were acquired by Kirk Douglas soon after publication as a vehicle in which he planned to return to the Broadway stage. When Douglas discovered that Wasserman had also tried to buy the rights, he hired him to write the play, agreeing that Wasserman should retain all rights to his dramatisation while Douglas retained screen rights to the novel.

After opening to positive reviews in Boston, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest went to Broadway, where it received reviews from New York's most influential critics that Douglas described as "murderous". Howard Taubman of the New York Times wrote of the play's "appalling taste", while Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune declared that the "tastelessness of this character (R.P. McMurphy) should be talked about".

The play struggled through a five-month run. "It was terrible," Wasserman later said. "Kirk was so frightened to return to the live stage he took refuge in being lovable every moment of the play. But his character was half Christ and half con-man and he was not meant to be lovable."

Wasserman was known for his testy character and relished his reputation as a cantankerous grouch. He fought not only with Douglas, but with his original co-librettist on La Mancha, the poet W.H. Auden (who eventually left the project) and the show's composer, Mitch Leigh, and on a later occasion with the director John Huston, for whom he wrote the film A Walk with Love and Death (1969). He had wisely advised Huston not to cast his own daughter, the then inexperienced Anjelica, in the leading role.

Born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, in 1914 (he had been unsure of the date until he tracked down his birth certificate in order to qualify for a pension from the writers' union), Wasserman was one of 14 children whose Russian immigrant parents ran silent-movie houses. Orphaned before he was 10, he had little formal education and spent most of his youth as a self-described "hobo", riding on freight trains and taking odd jobs including as a lumberjack, before eventually turning to writing.

He was living on a rooftop in Los Angeles in the mid-Thirties when he joined a street theatre group, The Rebel Players. Later, he directed plays for the Federal Theatre Project, as well as stage and lighting design for Katherine Dunham's dance company. In 1946 he was one of the producers of Beggar's Holiday, a short-lived adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera with a score by Duke Ellington. Starring Alfred Drake, the show was picketed for featuring an inter-racial romance.

He became a writer after observing that "everything on a stage was subservient to the text", and he became one of the most prolific television dramatists of the Fifties. He was working on a film script in Spain in 1959 when he read an erroneous newspaper report that he was adapting Don Quixote. "As it happened, I'd never read the novel," he said. "I still haven't, all the way through. As a matter of fact, I don't really like the novel".

Wasserman became fascinated, however, by the character of Cervantes. "Here, surely, was one of the unluckiest men who ever lived... five times in prison, twice excommunicated by the church, often near starvation, he bore his hardships with good humour and an unflagging faith in life. I had a notion of doing a play about Cervantes which would invoke Don Quixote as his alter ego. I presented a one-page outline to the television producer David Susskind and he said, 'Here's a cheque, start writing'. When they hand you that cheque, you're trapped. So, I began".

In Wasserman's television play, I, Don Quixote (1959), Lee J. Cobb played Cervantes/Don Quixote, and Eli Wallach was his servant Sancho Panza. "We all considered it a bit too intellectual, a bit too much for the audience," said Wasserman. "It wasn't. Letters poured in from all over the country – it was in those glorious days when television was not yet controlled by advertisers." The stage-musical version, Man of La Mancha, opened with little fanfare and hardly any advance bookings in 1965, with Richard Kiley heading the cast. It quickly became a hit and won a Tony award as best musical. "The Impossible Dream" was described by the historian Gerald Bordman as "the last major hit to emerge from Broadway before rock-and-roll overwhelmed the nation".

In 1972 it was filmed disastrously by Arthur Hiller. Despite a cast headed by Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren, the ponderous production, badly sung, is a contender for the screen's worst major musical, but the stage version continues to be produced all over the world. "It speaks across borders, without any references to political situations," Wasserman told The New York Times. "It's about as close to universal as one can get. I didn't know that when I was writing it, of course."

Though One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest flopped first time on stage, an off-Broadway revival starring William Devane in 1971 ran for over 2,000 performances and prompted the Oscar-winning film version in 1975 (which did not involve Wasserman). The play was subsequently revived on Broadway in 2001 starring Gary Sinise, who won a Tony for the best revival of a play, and in 2004 it was successfully staged in London, starring Christian Slater and Frances Barber.

Wasserman settled with his second wife, Martha ("who remains wonderfully serene in the face of my troublesome ways") in Arizona and was still writing up until his death. Recently he told his wife that he would require obituaries to say only that he invented the phrase, "the impossible dream" – and lived it.


Dale Wasserman, playwright: born Rhinelander, Wisconsin 2 November 1914; married Ramsay Ames (marriage dissolved), married 1984 Martha Garza; died Phoenix, Arizona 21 December 2008.
Independent

Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan dies
Patrick McGoohan, the creator and star of cult classic The Prisoner, has died aged 80, it was confirmed.


telegraph