ALBERT HOFMANN, 102; CHEMIST DISCOVERED LSD

Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who
came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered
in 1938 as his "problem child," died April 29 at his home in Burg, a
village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack.

His death was confirmed by Rick Doblin, the Boston-based founder of
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a
nonprofit pharmaceutical company developing LSD and other
psychedelics for prescription medicines.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, thousands of times stronger than
mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as
psychedelic -- a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with
color and movement.

After its discovery, LSD was viewed as a wonder drug with the
potential to treat problems including schizophrenia and alcoholism.
For the latter, some held the theory that chronic drinkers quit only
after experiencing the hallucinations of delirium tremens.

LSD attracted many prominent advocates. They included Aldous Huxley,
author of "Brave New World," and psychologist Timothy Leary, who saw
the drug as a potent way for people to live up to his 1960s
counterculture motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The CIA was also widely reported to have used LSD in experiments on
unwitting subjects. This, and greater recreational use that caused
some fatal overdoses, led to the widespread condemnation of the drug
and, by the early 1970s, its criminalization. As a result, research
permission and funding from state and federal agencies was terminated.

In Dr. Hofmann's opinion, outlawing LSD made its use even more
attractive to young people and diminished any safeguards. He spoke of
many hippies stopping by his home on the way to their spiritual
quest, hoping to score from his "secret stash."

Dr. Hofmann came across LSD while working on medicinal uses of a
fungus to act as a circulatory heart-lung stimulant. His first LSD
"trip" occurred in 1943, a troubling experience that led him to write
in his journal, "A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my
body, mind and soul."

Dr. Hofmann remained wary of LSD's recreational uses as well as its
portrayal in the media.

"I was not surprised that it became a ritual drug in the youth
anti-establishment movement, but I was shocked by irresponsible use
that resulted in mental catastrophes," he told Playboy magazine in
2006. "That's what gave the health authorities a pretext for totally
prohibiting its production, possession and use."

Albert Hofmann was born Jan. 11, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland. He was
the oldest of four children, and after his father, a toolmaker, fell
seriously ill, he was forced as a teenager to seek a commercial
apprenticeship to support the family.

While learning a trade, he continued his private schooling with
financial help from his godfather. In 1930, he received a doctorate
from the University of Zurich, where he studied the chemistry of
plants and animals, and he joined the pharmaceutical-chemical firm
Sandoz (now Novartis) in Basel.

Among his early accomplishments was the synthesis of an alkaloid that
prompted uterine contractions to stop postpartum bleeding.

In 1938, he was exploring a circulatory heart-lung stimulant when he
happened on LSD-25 while conducting purification and crystallization
experiments on the fungus ergot, which grows on rye. Ergot had been
long used to induce childbirth.

Lysergic acid is an active part of therapeutically essential ergot
alkaloids, and Dr. Hofmann began combining it with other molecules
for his research.

At the time, LSD showed little effect on lab animals besides some
agitation. It was shelved for five years until he, on a hunch,
repeated the experiment to help him with another medical study.

Having unknowingly absorbed some of the compound, he experienced a
dizzying sensation that also made him restless.

He wrote in a journal about this first known encounter: "At home I
lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition,
characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.

"In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be
unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of
fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic
play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away."

Three days later, April 19, he bicycled home after consuming 250
micrograms of LSD in a now-famous "trip" that has become known as
Bicycle Day. The route he took home was later named in his honor.

That time, he said, he felt some of the darker symptoms of the drug:
a feeling of impending death, of possession by the devil, of feeling
violently threatened by family and neighbors. Above all, he wrote, "I
was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane."

As he continued to study the drug, Dr. Hofmann struck up a
correspondence with German novelist Ernst Junger, who had
experimented with mescaline. At Dr. Hofmann's home in 1951, the
scientist administered .05 of a milligram of LSD to Junger and
himself as they were surrounded by violet roses, Japanese incense and
a Mozart concerto for flute and harp.

"Ernst Junger enjoyed the color display of oriental images," he later
wrote. "I was on a trip among Berber tribes in North Africa, saw
colored caravans and lush oases."

Further controlled experimentation by University of Zurich scientists
on humans subjects -- some with psychiatric problems -- showed a
similar calming reaction. This led Sandoz to manufacture LSD under
the trade name Delysid by the late 1940s.

It entered the U.S. market and, during the next two decades, LSD was
intensely researched as a drug to treat all manner of emotional and
addictive disorders. Humphry F. Osmond, a British-born psychiatrist,
introduced the word "psychedelic" to describe the effects of
mescaline and LSD while corresponding with Huxley in 1956.

Dr. Hofmann wrote in a 1980 book, "LSD, My Problem Child," that LSD
brought him the "same happiness and gratification that any
pharmaceutical chemist would feel on learning that a substance he or
she produced might possibly develop into a valuable medicament."

But he said he was increasingly disturbed by a "huge wave of an
inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above
all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. . . . The more
[LSD's] use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in
the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically
unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for
the Sandoz firm."

He described meeting Leary in September 1971 at a railway station
snack bar in Lausanne; Leary was living in Switzerland. He said they
had a cordial but strong exchange of words in which Dr. Hofmann
criticized Leary's self-promotion and his "propagation of LSD use"
among impressionable young people.

Dr. Hofmann said that Leary said that American teenagers "with regard
to information and life experience, were comparable to adult
Europeans. . . . For that reason, he deemed the LSD experience
significant, useful, and enriching, even for people still very young in years."

Dr. Hofmann headed the research department for natural medicines at
Sandoz before retiring in 1971. At the company in the 1950s and
1960s, he discovered and named many of the active hallucinogenic
ingredients in Mexican "magic mushrooms," including psilocybin and
psilocin. He was credited with important developments in medications
for geriatric and gynecological uses as well as drugs to control
blood pressure.

He was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee and a fellow of the
World Academy of Sciences. He was a prolific writer of scientific
articles and the author of several books, many of which tried to bind
the scientific with the spiritual. In particular, he denounced the
demonization of LSD after hippies and societal dropouts seemed to
have monopolized the media's focus.

In his 1989 book "Insight Outlook," he wrote that LSD taken by
"mentally stable persons in the right set and setting" was suited to
the Western world, which he saw rife with "materialism, estrangement
from nature, . . . [and] the missing of a sense-making philosophical
fundamentalness of life."

His 100th birthday was celebrated in Basel as a referendum on his
greatest discovery. He attended the conference, "LSD: Problem Child
and Wonder Drug," and told one reporter that it was his daily diet of
a raw egg that kept him spry, not, as many LSD enthusiasts suspected,
his long-ago experiments.

His wife of more than 70 years, Anita Hofmann, died in December. One
son died years earlier.

Survivors include three children.