April 19, 1943: What Hofmann Didn't Know He Was Starting

“On the day Hofmann rode his bicycle home from work, Germany was fighting on the eastern front, the Holocaust was at its peak, and the Allies had not yet landed in Europe. The world LSD was born into was not the world it would transform.”

Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD for the second time and accidentally absorbed a small amount through his fingertips on April 16, 1943. He rode his bicycle home from the drug company laboratory in Basel on April 19, 1943, now celebrated annually as Bicycle Day.

April 19, 1943 was also the day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, the largest single act of armed Jewish resistance to the Nazi genocide. The coincidence is not meaningless. The world in which LSD was discovered was a world in which the most extreme expressions of human cruelty were operating at industrial scale, a world in which the Enlightenment's confidence in reason's ability to produce better institutions and better people had been catastrophically tested.

Hofmann knew nothing of this context on his bicycle ride. He was experiencing the most dramatic perceptual event of his life and trying to stay on his bicycle while doing so. He reached home. His neighbor brought him milk. She looked like a witch. By morning the world was luminous and ordinary.

What he had discovered would spend the next thirty years being used by people who were partly responding to the world the war had left: a world in which the confidence in Western civilization's adequacy had been shattered, in which the administrative machinery of the rational state had been used for mass murder, in which existentialism and pessimism about the human condition had displaced the Progressive Era's optimism. The countercultural use of LSD in the 1960s was not only about pleasure or rebellion, it was about the search for a different basis for human life than the one that had produced the concentration camps.

Huxley, who first took mescaline in 1953, was a man who had watched the twentieth century's catastrophes from a position of intelligence and literary achievement and found them evidence that Western civilization's confident project was failing. The Doors of Perception was written by someone who had read Huxley's dystopia in Brave New World and then found, in a living room in Los Angeles, what he thought might be a correction.

Hofmann, in My Problem Child, places his discovery in this broader context more gently than Huxley did. He argues that the mystical experience LSD occasions is one of the few things that reliably produces the quality of consciousness that ecological and ethical crisis requires: a sense of connection to the natural world, a reduction in the ego's monopoly on significance, a direct encounter with the sacred that religion was increasingly failing to deliver to secular minds.

The 2017 crystal structure of LSD bound to its receptor, solved at the University of North Carolina, shows a molecule that fits its receptor with nearly perfect complementarity, held in place by a protein lid that explains its twelve-hour duration. The chemistry is elegant in ways that feel intentional, though intention is not something molecules have. Hofmann would have found this structural confirmation satisfying: it shows that what he synthesized was not a crude blunt instrument but a pharmacologically precise key that fits a specific receptor architecture shaped by evolution.

The receptor it fits, the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, is found in the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the regions of the brain most associated with self-referential processing. Activating it with a molecule of LSD's precision disrupts the default mode network's ability to maintain its ordinary filtering function. The result is what Hofmann described on the morning after Bicycle Day: a world that seemed newly created, luminous, more itself than it ordinarily was.

He had discovered this on April 19, 1943, in the middle of the worst war in human history, in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Switzerland, while trying to make a drug for postpartum hemorrhage. The discovery was not intended. The discovery was not planned. The discovery was, as he always said, something that came to him, a presentiment, a hunch, a return to a compound he had filed away five years before because the animal tests showed nothing.

The world it entered was a world in desperate need of something it could not name. The problem child spent the next eighty years being what the world needed and what the world, repeatedly, refused to use correctly.

Sources

• Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (1979)
• Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven (1987)
• Wacker et al., Cell (2017)
• Wikipedia, History of LSD