My role models, or why DNA is a fantasy...
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.'
mail.psychedelic-library.org
Message 21423303
==================
Mullis begins with the event that changed his life, during a May 1983 nighttime drive through the mountains of Mendocino County in a silver Honda. Applying his knowledge of computer programming, Mullis mentally conjured up a technique of finding a specific sequence on DNA and replicating the hell out of it. 'Natural DNA is a tractless coil,' he says, 'like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.' The polymerase chain reaction makes sense of that tape. Now 'you could have all the DNA you wanted,' he writes. And it's 'easy.' P.C.R. finds and multiplies tiny fragments of DNA. After 30 doublings, for instance, you have a billion times as much as you started with.
Mullis explains: 'It was a chemical procedure that would make the structures of the molecules of our genes as easy to see as billboards in the desert and as easy to manipulate as Tinkertoys. . . . It would find infectious diseases by detecting the genes of pathogens that were difficult or impossible to culture. . . . The field of molecular paleobiology would blossom because of P.C.R. Its practitioners would inquire into the specifics of evolution from the DNA in ancient specimens. . . . And when DNA was finally found on other planets, it would be P.C.R. that would tell us whether we had been there before.'
Mullis submitted his paper to the two most prestigious science journals in the world, Science and Nature. Both rejected it. He had some consolation. On Oct. 13, 1993, a phone call from Stockholm offered him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 'I'll take it!' he said, displaying the decisiveness that has marked his career. He then called his mother to tell her she could stop sending him articles from Reader's Digest about advances in DNA chemistry.
biology-online.org
In Mullis's 1998 essay collection, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, he relates a number of experiences that some consider strange, and which critics point out to question his scientific judgment. He also details his use of LSD. Perhaps the strangest episode Mullis relates, he says, happened while at his cabin in the remote northern California wilds; John Edward Mack noted that episode has many hallmarks of the abduction phenomenon. Late one evening while walking to the latrine, Mullis saw a "glowing raccoon" which spoke to him, saying "Good evening, doctor." The next thing he remembered, several hours had seemingly passed without his recall: it was dawn, and he was strolling on a path near the cabin. His clothing was dry and clean, unlike what he'd expected from wandering the forest in the dark of night for several hours.
Mullis later wrote, "I wouldn't try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can't do any experiments. I can't make glowing raccoons appear. I can't buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can't cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don't deny what happened. It's what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can't reproduce. But it happened."[7]
en.wikipedia.org
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(I'm pissed; I left Berkely in '66; he could have turned me on 6 years earlier)
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
Mullis, Kary. (1998).
New York:Pantheon.
Note: The author was awarded a Nobel Prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
Excerpt(s): At Georgia Tech, I had a wife and a little girl. I had short hair and I studied all the time. My senior year I made perfect grades. I studied physics and math and chemistry to the point where I would never have to study them again. And all I knew about drugs was what I read in magazines like Time and Life. I learned that marijuana was a dangerous addictive drug and that I should stay away from it. On the other hand, I learned that LSD was a miracle that just might enable scientists to understand the workings of the brain, could be the cure for alcoholism, and, just incidentally, might prevent World War III. Psychiatrists were prescribing it for their patients. In 1966 LSD had not yet been made illegal. Respected, well known people were admitting that they had experimented with LSD. The Luce family, the publishers of Time and Life, were so intrigued by the scientific potential of LSD that they funded the research of Harvard professor Timothy Leary.
A person who loved playing with chemicals as much as I did just couldn't help but be intrigued by LSD. The concept that there existed chemicals with the ability to transform the mind, to open up new windows of perception, fascinated me. I considered myself to be a serious scientist. At the time it was still all very scholarly and still legal. There was no tawdry aura over it. People weren't blaming their kids' problems on it yet. Hippies had just started to differentiate themselves from beatniks and the difference seemed to be fewer years and more hair on the hippies. And they stayed in college.
In 1966 I wanted to try LSD. My wife, Richards, helped me pack up the Impala, we put our daughter Louise in the back seat, and we drove to Berkeley for graduate school. ...
Brad had experimented with psychedelic drugs and agreed to guide me through my first trip. He suggested that before I took LSD, I should smoke some marijuana because it might give me some idea of how my consciousness would be changed. Marijuana scared me, I told him. Everything I'd read about it said that it was a bad drug, an addictive drug - one toke and you're a slave for life.
He persuaded me to smoke a "joint" as he called it. Within moments my fear disappeared. I was laughing. Brad and I talked about wise things for hours. ...
During dinner, Brad gave me what was called a double-domed 1000 microgram Owsley. He had bought it for five dollars. It was soon to become illegal. I didn't finish dinner. I started laughing. I got up from the table and realized, on the way to the couch, that everything I knew was based on a false premise. I fell down through the couch into another world.
Brad put Mysterious Mountain by Hovhaness on the stereo and kept playing it over and over. It was the perfect background for my journey. I watched somebody else's beliefs become irrelevant. Who was that Kary Mullis character? That Georgia Tech boy. I wasn't afraid. I wasn't anything. I noticed that time did not extend smoothly - that it was punctuated by moments - and I fell down into a crack between two moments and was gone.
My body lay on the couch for almost four hours. I felt like I was everywhere. I was thrilled. I'd been trapped in my own experiences - now I was free. The world was filled with incredibly tiny spaces where no one could find me or care what I was doing. I was alone. My mind could see itself.
Brad had given me 1000 micrograms because he wanted me to have a thorough experience. I think he said "blow your ass away." With 100 micrograms you feel a little weird, you might hallucinate, and you can go dancing, but you know you're on acid. You're aware that you're having a trip and the things that you see are hallucinations. You know that you should not respond to them. When you take 1000 micrograms of LSD, you don't know you've taken anything. It just feels like that's the way it is. You might suddenly find yourself sitting on a building in Egypt three thousand years ago, watching boats on the Nile. ...
About five o'clock in the morning I began to come back to earth. The most amazing aspect of the entire experience was that I landed back in the middle of my normal life. It was so sweet to hear the birds, to see the sun come up, to watch my little girl wake up and start playing. I appreciated my life in a way I never had before.
On the following Monday I went to school. I remember sitting on a bench, waiting for a class to begin, thinking, "That was the most incredible thing I've ever done." ...
I wanted to understand what had happened. How could 1000 micrograms - one thousandth of a gram - of some chemical cause my entire fucking sensorium to undergo such incredible changes? What mechanisms inside my brain were being so drastically affected? What did these chemicals do to my visuals? I wanted to know how it worked. I wanted to know more about neurochemistry. (pages 162-167)
csp.org
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He's hardly alone. I think there's an entire worldwide underground of scientists that use LSD as a cognitive tool:
wired.com
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