ALBERT HOFMANN, THE FATHER OF LSD, DIES AT 102

PARIS -- Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the
world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died
Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president
of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a
California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann's 1979
book "LSD: My Problem Child."

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide
in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until
five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that
became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and
potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More
important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was
the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and
understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That
perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious
epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and
professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on
Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no
higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family
lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his
childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of
a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. "It was a real paradise up there," he
said in an interview in 2006. "We had no money, but I had a wonderful
childhood."

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

"It happened on a May morning -- I have forgotten the year -- but I
can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path
on Martinsberg above Baden," he wrote in "LSD: My Problem Child." "As
I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song
and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an
uncommonly clear light.

"It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as
though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an
indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security."

Though Dr. Hofmann's father was a Roman Catholic and his mother a
Protestant, Dr. Hofmann, from an early age, felt that organized
religion missed the point. When he was 7 or 8, he recalled, he spoke
to a friend about whether Jesus was divine. "I said that I didn't
believe, but that there must be a God because there is the world and
someone made the world," he said. "I had this very deep connection
with nature."

Dr. Hofmann went on to study chemistry at Zurich University because,
he said, he wanted to explore the natural world at the level where
energy and elements combine to create life. He earned his Ph.D. there
in 1929, when he was just 23. He then took a job with Sandoz
Laboratories in Basel, attracted by a program there that sought to
synthesize pharmacological compounds from medicinally important plants.

It was during his work on the ergot fungus, which grows in rye
kernels, that he stumbled on LSD, accidentally ingesting a trace of
the compound one Friday afternoon in April 1943. Soon he experienced
an altered state of consciousness similar to the one he had
experienced as a child.

On the following Monday, he deliberately swallowed a dose of LSD and
rode his bicycle home as the effects of the drug overwhelmed him.
That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as
"bicycle day."

Dr. Hofmann's work produced other important drugs, including
methergine, used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging, the leading cause
of death from childbirth. But it was LSD that shaped both his career
and his spiritual quest.

"Through my LSD experience and my new picture of reality, I became
aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of
the animal and plant kingdom," Dr. Hofmann told the psychiatrist
Stanislav Grof during an interview in 1984. "I became very sensitive
to what will happen to all this and all of us."

Dr. Hofmann became an impassioned advocate for the environment and
argued that LSD, besides being a valuable tool for psychiatry, could
be used to awaken a deeper awareness of mankind's place in nature and
help curb society's ultimately self-destructive degradation of the
natural world.

But he was also disturbed by the cavalier use of LSD as a drug for
entertainment, arguing that it should be treated in the way that
primitive societies treat psychoactive sacred plants, which are
ingested with care and spiritual intent.

After his discovery of LSD's properties, Dr. Hofmann spent years
researching sacred plants. With his friend R. Gordon Wasson, he
participated in psychedelic rituals with Mazatec shamans in southern
Mexico. He succeeded in synthesizing the active compounds in the
Psilocybe mexicana mushroom, which he named psilocybin and psilocin.
He also isolated the active compound in morning glory seeds, which
the Mazatec also used as an intoxicant, and found that its chemical
structure was close to that of LSD.

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with
such outsize personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and
Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death in 1963, asked his wife for an
injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of throat cancer.

Yet despite his involvement with psychoactive compounds, Dr. Hofmann
remained moored in his Swiss chemist identity. He stayed with Sandoz
as head of the research department for natural medicines until his
retirement in 1971. He wrote more than 100 scientific articles and
was the author or co-author of a number of books

He and his wife, Anita, who died recently, reared four children in
Basel. A son died of alcoholism at 53. Survivors include several
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his
hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding.
"Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In
death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was
before I was born, that's all."