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Basel, Switzerland
82 years ago

On April 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was working in his laboratory at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel when he accidentally absorbed a tiny amount — estimated at a fraction of a milligram — of lysergic acid diethylamide, a compound he had first synthesized in 1938 and then set aside. He began to feel dizzy and restless, and decided to cycle home. The journey home on his bicycle, during which he experienced vivid and increasingly intense visual disturbances, became one of the most famous commutes in scientific history.

Hofmann had been investigating derivatives of lysergic acid — a compound found in ergot, a fungus that grows on rye — hoping to find a stimulant for circulation and respiration. LSD-25, the 25th compound in the series, had seemed unremarkable in initial animal tests in 1938 and had been shelved. Five years later, a chemist's intuition led Hofmann to resynthesise it. The accidental absorption on April 16 — and the deliberate self-experiment three days later, on April 19, when Hofmann took what he thought would be a minimal dose (it was in fact five times what would now be considered a significant dose) — revealed properties nobody had anticipated.

Hofmann's April 19 deliberate experiment produced an overwhelming experience that alarmed him. He asked his laboratory assistant to accompany him home. Because it was wartime, cars were restricted; they cycled. The journey — now commemorated annually as 'Bicycle Day' in psychedelic circles — involved Hofmann believing he had gone mad, his neighbour transforming into a 'malevolent witch' in his perception, and a confrontation with what felt like his own death. He later described it as the most terrifying experience of his life — followed by the most beautiful.

Sandoz patented LSD and distributed it to researchers as 'Delysid' from the early 1950s, believing it had potential as a psychiatric research tool — a chemical means of producing a temporary psychotic state for study. For more than a decade, LSD was used in clinical psychiatry and was the subject of serious academic research. Timothy Leary and the counterculture of the 1960s transformed its public image from research tool to recreational drug, which led to its Schedule I classification in the United States in 1968.

Hofmann spent the rest of his long life — he died in 2008 at the age of 102 — advocating for a return to serious scientific research on LSD, which he considered a 'sacred drug' when properly used. He called it 'his problem child.' The current generation of psychedelic-assisted therapy research — which has shown promising results in trials for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and end-of-life anxiety — represents exactly the scientific reconsideration he had been arguing for since the 1960s.

On April 16, 1943, a chemist cycling home from work discovered by accident that a compound he had nearly forgotten could produce an experience of reality so different from ordinary consciousness that it required entirely new frameworks to describe. Eighty years later, the science he accidentally began is being rebuilt from the ground up.

How much do you know about Albert Hofmann, the discovery of LSD, the psychedelic research of the 1950s, and the current generation of clinical trials bringing psychedelic-assisted therapy into mainstream medicine?