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The Internet And The Father Of Acid

I've been racking my brain all day to come up with an excuse to blog about the death of Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. Turns out Nick Carr already beat me to it!

Linking the life and work of Hofmann (who was for many years the head of research for natural medicines at Sandoz Laboratories, in Basel, Switzerland) to recent comments on "global consciousness" and the World Wide Web by Tim O'Reilly and Robert Scoble, Carr (the former executive editor of the Business Review at Harvard, for years the academic home of Timothy Leary -- hmmm...) notes, "Might I just point out here that both LSD and the Web were invented in Switzerland?"

"Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938," reports The New York Times in his obituary, "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."

All his life, Dr. Hofmann was an advocate for the environment and a prophet for humanity's oneness with nature. No word on what he might have thought about YouTube or Grand Theft Auto IV, which came out the day of his death.

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