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captmueller
chemical shaman
Registered: 10/25/04
Posts: 115
Last seen: 17 years, 17 days
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acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life!
#4276336 - 06/09/05 02:20 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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i got this off of the maps mailing list.. wonderfully enlightening...
Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Mail on Sunday (London)
August 8, 2004
SECTION: FB; Pg. 44; Pg. 45
LENGTH: 758 words
HEADLINE: Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the secret of life
BYLINE: ALUN REES
BODY:
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.
&nbs! p; 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 wa s a founder member of Soma, a legalise-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.
It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse inWales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social cir! cle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing 'acid' in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harke! r, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.
'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.
'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix sha! pe while on LSD.
'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.
He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise.
When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'
LOAD-DATE: August 10, 2004
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: captmueller]
#4276499 - 06/09/05 03:08 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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Wow.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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HedgeWych
Seeking

Registered: 03/21/05
Posts: 88
Loc: Pacific North West
Last seen: 18 years, 6 months
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: captmueller]
#4276528 - 06/09/05 03:18 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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And to think of all the murders that have been solved, and families reunited... all because of lsd. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
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OneMoreRobot3021


Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,024
Loc: the sky
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: HedgeWych]
#4276533 - 06/09/05 03:20 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
HedgeWych said: And to think of all the murders that have been solved, and families reunited... all because of lsd. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
Great point.
-------------------- Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake. -Erik Davis
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The_Green_Glow
i consume yasoul

Registered: 02/20/05
Posts: 160
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: OneMoreRobot3021]
#4276861 - 06/09/05 04:59 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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-------------------- "are you goin to hell or heaven? did you walk with the sinners or pray with the reverend? tell the truth i did a little of both, but aint no tellin where im goin til my bodies a ghost." --Twiztid
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moog
Stranger

Registered: 02/15/05
Posts: 1,296
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: The_Green_Glow]
#4276904 - 06/09/05 05:11 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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I don't think I believe either of these stories.
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veggie

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: captmueller]
#4277345 - 06/09/05 06:47 PM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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captmueller, That is fascinating. I never knew that about Crick. It makes me wonder how many more famous people and inventions/discoveries have been influenced by a chemically induced altered state.
The_Green_Glow, The link to the book review is also interesting, although somewhat biased. Rosalind Franklin's work with DNA has been very well credited and documented. The only reason she didn't share the Nobel Prize is that she had passed away by then and the reason she is not mentioned in the MAPS article is that she was not a devotee of LSD as was Crick, which is the articles focus.
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captmueller
chemical shaman
Registered: 10/25/04
Posts: 115
Last seen: 17 years, 17 days
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Re: acid gave us the knowledge of the building blocks of life! [Re: veggie]
#4278898 - 06/10/05 06:23 AM (18 years, 8 months ago) |
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veggie have you read acid dreams? it was a great read ...i love the idea that jfk did acid and smoked pot in the white house...just think of the things he might have done...the possiblitlity of a ethnogen enlightened president..hmmmmm
namaste, captmueller
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