3 ms·

> Hofmann was aided in the discovery process by his willingness to ingest mushroom extracts to help verify the presence of the active compounds. It sounds like

• eindiran 7y ago
  In Hoffman's book "LSD: My Problem Child", he has a chapter (#6, entitled "The Mexican Relatives of LSD") where he talks at length about the process of isolating psilocybin and what his motivations were in participating. What you mentioned definitely played a role. Here is a .pdf copy of the book from MAPS: [0] If you're interested in the history of this stuff, it's well worth a read. More generally, I think many exceptional drug chemists have been willing to bioassay the novel drugs they make. Almost inarguably the most prolific drug chemist of all time, Alexander Shulgin, bioassayed over 200 novel drugs, making him the first human being to try almost all of them[1]. What is most interesting about Hoffman in this regard is that he didn't set out to be a drug chemist: he discovered LSD was psychoactive on accident[2]. So his temperament (with regard to his willingness to bioassay novel compounds) was a fortuitous coincidence. [0] https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/lsdmyproblemchild.pdf https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/lsdmyproblemchild.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_dieth...
  • bagacrap 7y ago
    not necessarily a coincidence, but perhaps a result. Psychedelics increase openness to new experiences.