Medicine: Mushroom Madness

In the spotless Basel laboratories of the Swiss drug company Sandoz A.G. a short, trim scientist of 52 performed a strange experiment. Research Director Albert Hofmann meticulously dissolved five milligrams of white crystals in a test tube of water. Then, while tense assistants looked on, he swallowed the potion, lay down on a couch and waited. Within an hour Hofmann began tg report: “I am losing my normal bodily sensations . . . My perception of space and time is changing . . . Your faces appear strange . . .” Finally: “Now, as I close my eyes, I see a wonderful but indistinct kaleidoscopic train of visions. They are vividly colored.”

Alone with his visions, Experimenter

Hofmann stayed on the couch three hours until the drug’s effects wore off. He got up feeling fine. After two years of delicate lab work, he announced last week, Hofmann had managed to isolate a mysterious substance—the chemical that has caused men of many races, through the millennia, to have otherworldly visions after eating certain kinds of mushrooms.

For Hofmann, such chemically induced visions are not new. He is famed among the world’s biochemists and psychiatrists because in 1943, by accident, he absorbed (probably through the skin of his fingers, he now speculates) an infinitesimal amount of a potent chemical. For a while it made him wacky. He identified it as lysergic acid diethylamide, now universally known as LSD-25. It has proved an invaluable weapon to psychiatrists seeking to reproduce symptoms like those of schizophrenia (TIME, Dec. 19, 1955).

Researcher Hofmann moved from LSD to mushrooms thanks largely to Ethnologist (and a J. P. Morgan vice president) R. Gordon Wasson and his Russian-born wife, two dedicated, medical-minded mushroom eaters. The Wassons have voyaged all over the world seeking ritual devotees of exotic mushrooms and sharing their hallucinations, reported on their experiences in LIFE and in a $125 book (only 500 copies printed). Mushrooms, Russia and History. A French companion on their travels sent Hofmann specimens of one of the most potent mushrooms, Psyilocybe mexicana. From its little brown umbrella, perched on a delicate stem, Hofmann isolated the pure chemical (he calls it psilocybin) that induced his experimental hallucinations.

Sandoz will release psilocybin only to highly reputable medical investigators. To them, it means that they can now use a third chemically pure substance—in addition to LSD-25 and mescaline—to induce controllable symptoms like those of uncontrolled mental illness. From such studies they hope to find chemical cures.