Crick. Elementary, my dear Watson. The guy what discovered all about Descendants N' Ancestors
August 8, 2004
HEADLINE: Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the
secret of life
BYLINE: ALUN REES
FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under
the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of
DNA nearly 50 years ago.
The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher
James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by
running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the
nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had
discovered the secret of life.
Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that
he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in
psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the
Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the
discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous
Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another
hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and
Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and
Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a
legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New
World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling
for a reform in the drugs laws.
It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the
inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever
seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse inWales that
was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered
scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American
writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come
to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure
THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a
brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the
attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project
in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of
producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business,
manufacturing 'acid' in a succession of rented houses before setting up
their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire,
in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds
2.5million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the
building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals
to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators
dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter
at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker,
whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrested. Harker
told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were
hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were
making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival
and the drugs charity Release.
'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe
industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer
is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people
to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the
only way to save themselves.
'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him
that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool,
to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to
new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on
LSD.
'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over
by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had
gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth
using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I
visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.
He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role
of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of
surprise.
When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'
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