This is just a quick note to say that Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first discovered LSD, has died at the grand old age of 102. He was something of a legend among modern-day medicinal chemists, not least because he decided to test out his discovery on himself.
You can find a report on his life on the Great Beyond blog.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I was lucky enough to hear Hofmann speak when I was in graduate school. He didn’t know what hit him when he first made the stuff. Apocrypha of the time had it that Leary used to put it in the punch at parties unbeknownst to attendees and that one undergraduate was killed as a result of walking across Massachusetts avenue thinking he was God, but that it was hushed up. Little did I realize then that I’d be using Sandoz products closely related to LSD (Sansert etc. etc) for most of my professional career as a neurologist to treat migraine.