It is an Extraordinary Thing

LSD as the product of a Phytopharmaceutical Dynasty

As we again approach the celebratory Bicycle Day on 19 April 2024, I cannot help pondering what an extraordinary thing it is that the account of the discovery of the psychoactive properties of LSD rests wholly on the testimony of one man, namely Albert Hofmann, the chemist who has claimed that the discovery of LSD was a mixture of chance and intuition. Especially now, in the throes of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’, many consider LSD’s discovery to be a world changing event. However, Hofmann’s account in his scientific autobiography ‘LSD My Problem Child’ has hardly been questioned.[i] It is surprising that this event has not been examined in terms of its social, political, and scientific context until my essay, ‘Bicycle Day in Ritual, Myth and History’, was published last year in my collected essays by Psychedelic Press.[ii] In that context I am forced to ask why Hofmann hardly had a good word for Arthur Stoll the former Director of the Sandoz pharmaceutical department, who initiated research into the pharmaceutical potential of ergot at Sandoz in 1917 and who employed Hofmann as a research assistant at the age of 23 in 1929.

Despite Stoll’s scientific achievements, as the first person to isolate ergot alkaloids and to succeed in identifying digitalis glycosides, according to his biographers Hofmann ‘let be known that he did not have a high opinion of (Stoll) as a chemist’.[iii] This is strange in light of the lengthy obituary for Stoll published by the Royal Society[iv] of which he was a member and which itemises his accomplishments in detail; or that Stoll was nominated by his peers for the Nobel prize seventeen times between 1938 and 1953, including once (Chemistry, 1942) by the Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Willstätter with whom Stoll studied and co-authored important papers. Hofmann complains in his ‘LSD My Problem Child’ that ‘There was scarcely a scientific discussion with Professor Stoll in which he did not mention his revered teacher Professor Willstätter and his work in Willstätter’s laboratory.’

But Willstätter was only one in a long line of organic chemists in a chain of pedagogical succession whose focus was on the identification of the active compounds in plant drugs and pigments. Stoll studied under Richard Willstätter (1872 –1942), whose doctoral thesis was on structure of Cocaine, and who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1915) for his research on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll.[v] Willstätter studied under Alfred Einhorn (1856 –1917), who synthesised the local anaesthetic Procaine. Einhorn himself studied under Adolph von Baeyer (1835 –1917) who won the Nobel Prize Chemistry in 1905, for work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds and who achieved syntheses of the plant dye Indigo and of Cocaine.

Reviewing this long history of research into plant pigments and plant drugs it is appropriate that Sandoz was initially established as a manufacturer of paints and dyes in 1886, Arthur Stoll being hired in 1917 to establish a pharmaceutical research department. This relationship between the fascination with and the study of plant dyes and plant drugs undoubtedly reaches back first to world of the alchemists and then into prehistory. Hofmann complains that Stoll refused to equip his laboratory’s fume hoods with ‘ventilators’ on the basis that ‘ventilation by gas flame had sufficed in Willstatter's laboratory’, [vi] implying that Stoll’s laboratory practice was dated. In this light Hofmann’s ‘LSD My Problem Child’ appears as self-hagiography, in which Hofmann places himself front and centre and deliberately distances himself from his scientific forbears, thus obscuring a scientific heritage from which the discovery of LSD eventually emerged.

More political and social background to the discovery of LSD, including how compromises made in the continuing manufacturing operations of Sandoz in Nazi Germany damaged a scientific friendship and the close friendship of Arthur Stoll with the author Hermann Hesse, a favourite of Sixties psychedelic culture, can be found in my essay ‘Bicycle Day in Ritual, Myth and History’. Other essays examine recreational use of Peyote by students and tutors in 1930s Harvard and the intersection of altered states and sapphic desire in a fantasy novel conceived in the literary Paris Lesbos of the 1920s.

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[i] Notable exceptions by Mike Jay and David Nichols are discussed in my essay ‘Bicycle Day in Ritual, Myth and History’ in Piper, A. (2023) Bicycle Day and other Psychedelic Essays. London: Psychedelic Press.

[ii] Hofmann, A. (1980) LSD, My Problem Child. New York: McGraw-Hill.

[iii] Hagenbach and Werthmüller, (2013). Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD, London: Synergetic Press, p.23.

[iv] See: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1972.0021 Accessed 02/04/2024.

[v] Studies on Chlorophyll were continued at Sandoz by Dr. Wiedemann, who joined Sandoz around the same time as Hofmann. See Hofmann, op cit.

[vi] Extraction fans, rather than relying on convection by means of a gas flame.