The WELL: inkwell.vue.246: John Markoff, WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID

#67: from ANDREW BROWN (tnf) Wed 3 Aug 05 08:53

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 08:53:00 PDT

Andrew Brown writes:

Another comment for the discussion

Now that I have looked at the original story, it is clearly not true, and for the following reasons.

1) It appeared in the Mail on Sunday. I have done enough work for them not to believe a word they print without corroboration

2) The timing is very odd: the work on the double helix was done in 1952 and 53, which is a long time before any real knowledge of LSD spread in the world.

3) The original source is reporting a story third-hand

4) Crick denied it. The "Print a word and I'll sue you" is not a non-denial denial. It's a straight-up denying denial. After all, he is not just accused of having taken LSD (which would make his life as a Brit difficult at La Jolla) but also of being the inspiration, albeint possibly unwittingly, of a gigantic criminal enterprise. I believe that the couple who made all that acid got something like 20 years. In British terms, that's fantastically libellous and someone as respectable as Crick would sue.

I wouldn't be in the least surprised if Crick and Sydney Brenner experimented with acid in the Sixties. But that would be a different story, and I've got no evidence for my suspicions, just a feeling for what that milieu was like and a suspicion that almost all the consciousness researchers got interested in the subject from bending their own. Certainly, one British consciousness researcher of my acquaintance is a heroic consumer of dope, and partial to acid as well. But I'm not going to <mmmmph>.

-- Andrew Brown [Read entire topic]

#66: It's a new sun to me (nukem777) Tue 2 Aug 05 10:12

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:12:00 PDT

We are what we are, going into and coming out of the casual drug experience. These guys and girls were all brilliant before they took drugs...maybe a few walls came down and some boxes were broken while they were relaxed and took their minds off their various projects for a time, but it still all came back on them to do something with the various insights that may have arisen during a good 'session' of drugs or partying...most of just filed it all under "wasted time". [Read entire topic]

#65: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Tue 2 Aug 05 07:20

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 07:20:00 PDT

Andrew Brown writes from off-Well:

I have no idea whether it is true that Crick used acid in his attempts to crack the double helix, but I doubt it because it would surely have come out earlier. What I do know is that there were at one stage lots of drugs around one of Crick's spinoff projects, the dissection, and later the sequencing, of the nematode c. elegans. The following story, pulled from my book, (http://www.thewormbook.com) came to me in 2001 from a very distinguished source describing the early Seventies at the Medical Research Council lab in Cambridge:

"each of the newly identified mutants had to be further tested, for touch sensitivity (you tapped them with an eyelash hair), tolerance of different temperatures, and drug resistance. 'These were still the Sixties, really' said someone who was there: when they were testing for drug resistant mutants, they used every drug they could get their hands on hands on, legal or not. But the worms never did anything very interesting on cannabis or LSD, and one morning, so the story goes the lab***s stock of acid had quietly disappeared from the refrigerator. 'The worms did not consume it', I was gravely told."

I have seen a photograph of one of these parties in which one Nobel Prize winner is smoking an unusually fat and irregularly rolled cigarette.

But no one ever attributed their insights to anything more than hard work (and brilliance). [Read entire topic]

#64: nape fest (zorca) Thu 14 Jul 05 10:58

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:58:00 PDT

that made my day. [Read entire topic]

#63: Dan Levy (danlevy) Mon 11 Jul 05 14:21

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 14:21:00 PDT

I think I am going to have to unearth some of the hypotheses that I have come up with under the influence of psychedelics. Perhaps I discovered something important. [Read entire topic]

#62: Gail Williams (gail) Mon 11 Jul 05 10:24

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 10:24:00 PDT

That does hurt the credibility a bit. Funny how a little ignorant opinionated assertion can tarnish an interesting story! Then again, it is possible that Crick himself described cellar temperature beer as "warm" and the thing is an odd paraphrase.

If accurate this adds to the lore of the orbweaver spider's overly-perfect web and Doc Ellis's no-hitter, each done on LSD. Along with a lot of music and visual arts compositions, and some computer innovation, of course. I think these storeis will start to emerge now as people get to a certain time in life when they feel safe telling such tales.

It oddly ties in to this study somebody pointed out in The WELL <news.> conference today:

Are Genius and Madness Related? Contemporary Answers to an Ancient Question http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=164902206

The description of the creative cluster in the article sheds some light on how a little bit on controlled "madness" has possible value (leaving aside the dangers of madness, which we all know about)

Very interesting! [Read entire topic]

#61: Andrew Alden (alden) Mon 11 Jul 05 10:05

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 10:05:00 PDT

Has this been corroborated anywhere else? It's just the kind of thing that friends-of-drugs would want to believe. Also, I don't appreciate the slam on English-style "warm beer."... [Read entire topic]

#60: Low and popular (rik) Mon 11 Jul 05 09:49

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 09:49:00 PDT

That is just wonderful. [Read entire topic]

#59: J Matisse Enzer (matisse) Mon 11 Jul 05 09:09

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 09:09:00 PDT

holy shit. cool.

Some day, I hope, real proper research on psychedelics will resume. There is a lot to learn. [Read entire topic]

#58: David Gans (tnf) Mon 11 Jul 05 09:04

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 09:04:00 PDT

Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the secret of life

BY ALUN REES August 8, 2004

FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalize-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.

More:

http://www.mayanmajix.com/art1699.html [Read entire topic]