The Supercomputers Designing the Future of Psychedelic Science | VICE | Blueprint
Channel: Blueprint Date: 2026-08-16 Duration: 47:46 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7c6uLoZYPc
It’s amazing.
It’s really amazing.
This is the structure of LSD that we published with the 5-HT2B receptor.
Oh, there’s LSD.
Oh, wow.
So, you dropped acid.
That’s right.
[laughter] How does that little tiny thing stabilize the active state of the [music] receptor and then have all these effects on human consciousness?
[music] So, we just got [music] the structure.
This is brand new.
No one in the world has ever seen this outside my lab.
This is the holy grail of hallucinogen action right here.
We have caught the hallucinogen in this stage of activating the receptor at atomic resolution.
Is this the first crystal structure?
This is a cryo-EM structure.
The very first, yes.
The only as far as I know.
5-HT2A is the most important receptor in the action of serotonergic psychedelics, but its precise conformation in the presence of an agonist like LSD has eluded scientists for decades.
For the first time, the structure of the LSD-bound 5-HT2A receptor has been elucidated using cryogenic electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography.
With the target now known, thousands of new psychedelics can be designed from the bottom up, ushering in a new era of psychedelic research.
When I grew up, it was very isolated.
I left school at 16 because the nuns wouldn’t give me books about Buddhism.
So I studied [music] that.
I studied classical Arabic.
Art was always my thing.
Then I turned on to cannabis when I was 16.
LSD when I was 22.
And then when I was 23 I had a life change.
In as much as a trauma and then a love affair.
And the love affair came with added advantage of immensely important new knowledge.
And it was knowledge which enabled me to practice how to live at that level of consciousness that I had always aspired to.
A full drop?
I do normally a full drop.
The tragedy of prohibition was that people stopped talking about LSD.
I felt this [music] is just a mistake society’s making.
And so I thought we have to first change drug policy and get it based on scientific evidence.
Because without that one’s not going to be allowed to do the research.
I’ll do it through the best science.
So that was my intention at the beginning of the ’70s.
My thing is to put it on my hand and lick it.
But if you prefer to put it in a bit of paper, you can divide it in two.
I see.
That’s an interesting technique.
The research that we’re now doing is showing amazingly how a psychedelic, in this case LSD, increases the connectivity, increases the function, etc.
It does help one thing.
If you don’t feel it, [music] let me know and Okay.
How do these things our very basic consciousness?
People have attempted [music] to understand and study consciousness through art, through writing [music] novels, through music, through philosophy, through all sorts of different processes.
[music] Why use science as a way of studying consciousness?
Well, my my natural way [music] would be other ways.
I mean, altered states of consciousness, extraordinary experiences, are very fascinating to study, but they’re very difficult to study.
I mean, I know telepathy exists because I had this passionate love affair with [music] a pigeon who I brought up from a baby, and he fixated and fell madly in love with me, and I with him.
That was the beginning of one of the most meaningful relationships in my life.
He had two main emotions, which was passionate love and hateful jealousy.
He hastened my partner to the room every day, and then came back and settled the conquest in the bed.
And his whole thing was getting me to [music] passionately cuddle him.
And he was hypnotic.
You know, he had a call which [music] you actually couldn’t resist.
And this would go on and on and raising, raising, raising.
And then finally you find yourself unable not to go and have a cuddle for half an hour.
Very hot here.
And she kissed my pupils.
Incredibly delicate [music] little tiny kisses.
Love making, sweet.
And he was just enchanting [music] her.
He’d do it with the sound.
It was a very kind of complete love.
[music] And he’d always be somewhere and swooping off.
It’s a great bird adrenaline.
And he could never make out why I didn’t go with [music] him.
Pathetic Human [music] who couldn’t fly.
My life would have been very different without [music] Birdy, because I would have done all sorts of things like marry Bart.
I never did because Birdy wouldn’t have liked me moving to Holland.
Cuz one couldn’t take Birdy to Holland.
Then he [music] could never go out.
I learned the sound through Bart.
Bart Hoogers.
He made LSD in his mother’s kitchen.
And she threw it away, and they had to make it all [music] again.
And that was that LSD which turned on Europe.
And it got to me in London.
And then I I took it, and really thought this is amazing.
Through meeting that scientist, [music] a great genius, and a long and [clears throat] marvelously productive love affair [music] with him, that I then enabled myself to get high and work with LSD.
It’s a natural product.
It’s made from ergot, which is a mold on rye, which the witches used to collect to make their magic brew.
There’s a fungus that’s like the mold that grows on bread.
[music] Only this fungus grows on wheat, and it grows on rye.
One of the byproducts of this fungus [music] is a group of chemical compounds made up of several different chemical constituents.
And all of these constituents [music] have a powerful effect on the body.
And these effects vary all over the map, from everything from causing an abortion to curing a migraine headache.
Now, anytime you have a a naturally occurring compound that has powerful physiologic effects, people in the drug industry, drug researchers will be looking at these molecules.
They’ll be trying to modify them, to change them, to see if they can change [music] the effects that are produced to make them safer.
They look for a lot of things.
This sclerotium is one of many stages in the life cycle of ergot, a parasitic fungus that infects [music] grasses around the world.
It will eventually fall to the ground, overwinter, and in the spring, ascospores [music] will infect future fields of grain.
The alkaloids contained within ergot can be used to synthesize a variety of psychedelics, chief among them, LSD.
Given how fluorescent these lysergamides are, I assume [music] that I’d be able to visualize them with an ultraviolet light, but they didn’t fluoresce at all.
Correct.
Yeah, the ergot sclerotia are like little pebbles.
You cannot see the fluorescent from the outside.
You have to extract the alkaloids.
There There are all kinds of pigments that have evolved presumably to [music] protect the ergot alkaloids from ultraviolet light.
I was always interested in the idea of microorganisms that we cannot see very well, and that chemicals that those microorganisms [music] produce can affect us on a societal level.
When you say affect us on a societal level, are you referring to LSD?
That chemical has certainly had a profound effect on on our society.
All the ergot alkaloid pathways [music] start the same through the first that we know of.
The critical branch point is at chanoclavine aldehyde.
Without the double bond, they’re dihydroergot alkaloid producers.
With the double bond, they’re lysergic acid derivative producers.
And this has been the major effort of your career is to figure this out.
Yes, figuring out the steps in the pathway, and then also trying to [music] understand biological function of these alkaloids.
The alkaloids that are hydrolyzed to produce lysergic acid are extremely difficult [music] to synthesize and without ergot LSD would have probably never been discovered.
[music] So, how does the fungus accomplish what is so difficult for human chemists?
Fungi are pretty amazing in terms of the chemistry they can conduct and you can find all kinds of unknown biosynthetic pathways in a fungus genetically that have never been found chemically yet.
And there are things you can do to wake the fungus up to make them produce chemicals.
One interesting example is the fungus that is used in making brie and camembert cheeses, Penicillium camemberti.
We were surprised to find all the genes required to make an ergot alkaloid.
Oh, wow.
That fungus was domesticated really in the last couple hundred years from another wild Penicillium species.
[music] And that wild Penicillium species still produces the ergot alkaloid.
Wow.
And do you think it could be [music] induced?
Could you produce a camembert that contains psychedelic lysergamides?
It would take some genetic engineering, [music] but it wouldn’t be that difficult.
Why do you think the fungus would choose this sort of host?
What benefit would it have?
Uh I mean, the fungus has the benefit of a relatively competition-free source of high-quality carbon.
In return, the fungus is providing protection from herbivores.
If we injected it in insects, it will kill the insects.
If we remove the ergot alkaloids, the fungus can no longer kill the insect.
[music] Do you think they enjoy the effect? it.
When they’re dying, they eat they’re just quit trying [music] or they’ll squirm in a circle, writhe uncontrollably.
You don’t think they’re writhing in joy?
No, I highly doubt [music] that.
It seems like just an amazing compound from a drug design [music] standpoint.
It’s almost like it was built perfectly for that receptor.
You couldn’t ask for a better fit.
And there’s something really miraculous about that.
The incredible potency of some lysergamides or other fungal alkaloids like psilocybin tends to promote this sort of misconception that these things must have been made for us [music] because they have such dramatic effects in the human mind, but that’s almost certainly not the case.
Correct.
It’s It’s hard to come up with an argument or a case where intoxicating humans was in some way beneficial to a fungus.
Fungi themselves are out there competing with insects and other fungi and other bacteria for resources.
I would say that the ergot alkaloids are most likely originated as ways of deterring or killing insects.
We share neurotransmitters with insects, therefore we are affected by the same chemicals in different ways.
While a diverse array of fungi produce ergolines for defense against insects, humans have also been victims of ergot poisoning for most of recorded history.
High doses of contaminated [music] rye led to instances of gangrenous ergotism and death.
It’s a matter of dosage.
In the cases where people suffered from ergotism, they were on a diet that [music] was primarily rye bread.
And if the amount of ergot to grain was a greater than 1% [music] and they could suffer these symptoms.
With a diversified diet, people are unlikely to suffer these symptoms.
So, do you think that there’s a reason that LSD-type lysergamides never appear in nature?
Um I’m going to guess in an ecological setting that they provided no advantage to the producing fungus.
The ergoline [music] scaffold is found in so many different forms of life.
Why would it appear in a sea squirt [music] and a morning glory endophyte and an entomopathogenic [music] fungus and a fungus that infects grasses.
In many cases where we see chemicals that we associate with fungi otherwise and then we suddenly [music] see it pop up in an animal or a plant when people look hard enough they [music] find a symbiotic fungus that is the real source of the chemical.
Serotonin receptors, dopamine receptors are common to lots of animals.
The ergot alkaloids interact with those receptors and produce an effect that provides an advantage to the producing organism.
It is a beautiful topiary.
It almost looks like the sporulating structure on an ergot sclerotium.
Ah.
It does look like that.
She said I think the freedom to explore your own consciousness is your personal right whether [music] they call it a Eucharist or a medicine or just [music] something to make them see more beauty.
You’re cheating beauty if you go and see it in a way without you enhancing your potential to see beauty.
My partner, Arthur Bugas, [music] I think in an experiment at the university took LSD and then he thought this is really incredible and started thinking about what is the physiological underpinning of these states.
And so that was it always been my passion but it became also and it got a new grounding with the hypothesis about the fall of man.
The fall blood from the brain with the upright position.
Wow, I’ve been wanting to read this for a really long time.
Have you?
Yes.
They’re impossible to find.
He saw friend of his standing on his head at a party.
And he said why are you doing that?
And he said to get more [music] blood in my brain.
And he suddenly realized because blood is heavier than cerebrospinal fluid pushing it down.
It’s to do with gravity.
Our upright position came with a certain loss of blood from the brain capillaries.
So, there was less brain function, simultaneous activity.
By creating an expansion window [music] in this closed system, the skull, the blood blows up to a different level.
The pressure of the heartbeat results in a higher volume of blood in the brain capillaries.
That’s so amazing.
He was very brilliant.
Bart got thrown out of England and wasn’t allowed to get back in.
Although he’d never committed a crime in his life.
His only crime was to say that LSD is a very Some journalists interviewed him and he said I can’t remember what he said.
He said it’s an extremely interesting compound which you should research or something.
And he called his daughter Marijuana.
He named his daughter Marijuana?
Yeah.
And that was enough to get him exterminated from the English borders for the next 20 years.
And was the the trepanation also controversial at that time?
It wasn’t a crime.
You couldn’t really use drugs then.
They were much more taboo than trepanation funnily enough.
[music] Interestingly, trepanation has been done throughout the world independently.
[music] Whether it was in Peru or Tibet, it was a very accepted thing.
And now it’s not accepted.
Just as psychedelics were impossible to research for 20 years, 30 years.
Now I’m finding [music] trepanning impossible to research because it’s really difficult [music] to get ethical approval.
It’s so easy to do the research into trepanning.
It is mad [music] that it’s not done.
I mean, that’s the crazy thing.
I I got plenty of people who’d volunteer to be trepanned.
Was there any interaction between trepanning and LSD?
For example, did LSD feel different after trepanning than it did before?
[music] Yes.
I would say there was.
Taking a psychedelic [music] like LSD is a big shift to the system.
I think the cultures where you find trepanning [music] were cultures where they used to take psychoactive substances.
And I think the people who were trepanned were often the priest class.
You can see that.
They [music] were the people with special burials.
And the priest class was the class who took the psychoactive substances.
So, I think they were related.
I think they’re in the same spectrum.
I love the brain.
I I’ve always been fascinated by consciousness.
I set up the Beckley Imperial Research Programme to study psychedelics with Dave Nutt.
We did the first study with psilocybin, which showed it could treat depression.
And the first brain imaging study with LSD.
And now the first brain imaging study with DMT.
And a lot of interesting studies.
[music] I was able to make MDMA for Rick Doblin.
I made Strassman’s DMT.
And I made the psilocybin for the Johns Hopkins studies.
[music] The substances were not available.
Nobody would make them.
They were prohibitively expensive.
None [music] of this would have been happening.
I feel really privileged because I was able to enable [music] what’s now being called this renaissance.
It’s pretty, huh?
Amazing.
[music] This is the normal lysergamide and this is the iso that follows it.
So, I’m going to see if I [music] can cut that a little bit.
Get a good clean sample of the first one out.
So, now it’s just a waiting game.
Cool thing about working with lysergamides is if you spill it, see my glove there?
Huh.
Once one of the only chemists [music] in the United States licensed to produce LSD, Nichols is [music] now retired but continues to synthesize psychedelics at UNC Chapel Hill.
His illustrious [music] career, spanning the synthesis of hundreds of novel compounds, is now winding down [music] with one final creation, a nitrogen mustard derivative of nor-LSD he calls C-lab.
[music] Is there any compound that you’ve wanted to synthesize you just couldn’t figure out a way to do it?
Well, for a long time it [music] was this one.
Nichols’ psychedelic nitrogen mustard would form an electrophilic aziridinium ion that he hopes would alkylate a mutant 5-HT2A receptor forming [music] an irreversible bond that could facilitate study of the drug receptor complex.
It seems like these lysergamides are pretty close to perfect.
Do you think there’s a lot of room for improvement?
If the duration of action and the potency is related to [music] being trapped in the receptor, you might be able to get high potency ligands that didn’t get trapped that wouldn’t have such a long duration of action.
And they might be more useful for therapy.
Right.
It’s It’s interesting time because there are a lot of players [music] are getting into the field now.
Yeah.
Including some big pharma people trying to see how they can make money.
It happened so quickly.
Yeah.
I spent my whole life in this field and never thought we’d get to the point we are now in my lifetime.
All of a sudden it’s oh, these things really work.
Now they’re have medical potential.
I don’t think it’s going to be that straightforward, but there opportunists jumping in that’s kind of surprised me.
David Nichols [music] has synthesized more psychedelic compounds than almost any other chemist in history, maybe the most.
He’s made enormous contributions [music] to the pharmacological understanding of how psychedelics act in the brain and he’s a real legend among anyone who cares about the science surrounding [music] psychedelics.
Okay.
Nothing fantastic.
[clears throat] I don’t make any money playing the flute.
That was great.
In high school I was kind of the chemistry geek.
I figured out how to make an improved stink bomb that wasn’t dangerous and things like that.
What was it?
Well, you know, the classic stink bomb was iron sulfide and acid and I didn’t want to carry a bottle of acid around.
I thought that was a little dangerous.
So then I eventually came to the discovery that aluminum sulfide was reactive enough that water was acidic enough to generate hydrogen sulfide.
So [music] if you were in that room the circle is what’s that smell?
So you know, stuff like that.
Things you can’t do today.
I mean, at that time you could go in there and buy saltpeter and powdered charcoal and sulfur and make gunpowder and the pharmacist would just wink at you.
Cincinnati [music] is a very conservative place.
All the things that were happening on the West Coast [music] were not happening in Cincinnati.
They actually had a street that was full of hippie shops and the police went up and they just declared all fire hazards and shut them all down and got them out of there.
They didn’t want [music] any kind of hippie influence in Cincinnati.
Not that I was a hippie because my parents were really conservative.
I think my father had PTSD.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
So, I developed an anti-authoritarian attitude from [music] a rebellion against my father.
Some friends in high school started smoking reefer.
Smoking what?
Reefer, marijuana, man.
You guys are going to get addicted and they they started laughing at me.
So, I went to a bookstore in Cincinnati, used bookstore, and I still have the book.
It’s called uh Solomon’s Materia Medica, pharmacology, and I read the [music] chapter in there that talked about cannabis.
It said there’s nothing to it.
It’s not addictive.
It’s harmless stuff.
Well, this is not what I’m hearing on the radio all the time.
So, I was like their consultant, I guess, on all things drugs.
So, then I thought, well, you know, this is cool.
I should go to school and learn about these more.
I know that it’s controversial to talk about personal experience.
I also know that this is something that has informed [music] your research.
Are there personal experiences that you would want to share that might illuminate some of this?
I did have an experience early on where I closed my eyes and I was projected outside the universe.
And the the universe is so far away.
It was just a dim green [music] glow off in the distance.
And I still remember that.
It was very powerful.
I said, “Oh, the whole purpose of the universe was to bring forth life.” I suppose if you could set up a society in ideal way and had kind of a right of passage, which is what like a lot of primitive societies do and they put them [music] through some pretty grueling things sometimes to wipe out all the abuse they’ve gotten as children.
I think a lot of people could probably benefit from psychedelic experience sometime in their lives.
It seems to me like there’s a yearning among the public for something different.
I never expected that all this the medical stuff would be taken off like it is.
Ultimately, the goal of all these people, even if it’s written, is to understand who we are.
And psychedelics get us closer to that than almost any other thing I know of.
You mentioned when you were first getting interested in this that [music] you read publications by Alexander Shulgin.
Did you reach out to him at that point or when did you [music] start really wonder who this guy was?
I met him when I was still a graduate student.
We had nice lively discussion.
[music] As an academic, I had to have hypotheses to test.
Um but Sasha could just [music] say, you know, like what if?
What if we make this?
What if we make that?
And then he would take [music] it himself and he would find out.
So, people said, “Oh, he was a scientist.” And I said, “No, he wasn’t really a scientist.
He was an alchemist.” He really was an alchemist.
[music] A scientist has a test of a hypothesis.
You find it, you develop a theory, and all.
He didn’t do that.
I don’t think he had any goal other than just to see how [music] many kinds of things he could make and he was always looking for You know, he was always interested in drugs that would enhance [music] human communication.
Sasha said, “I communicate with anybody [music] who writes to me.
Don’t worry about it.” So, I just wrote him a letter.
I’ve got two boxes of correspondence, letters that I had with to and from Sasha.
August 24th, 1970.
Dear Mr.
Nichols, Thank you for your kind letter of August 11.
I no idea if it’s proper or considerate for graduate student to correspond in addition in extenso to his mentor, but I assure you I’m not in any way swayed by conventions and proprieties.
I just barely I’m exclusively interested in scientific information and appreciate any correspondence that will allow me to give and take in the area of new ideas and observations.
[music] Wow.
The world is ripe to learn but jaded to be instructed.
[music] This psychotomimetic thing will not be solved in the next 3 months and don’t knock yourself [music] out in the effort.
Learn your trade, the degree, then learn your art, the skills within your fingers, and only then begin to build upon the insights that may result from the knowledge that these separate threads [music] can be tied together.
This letter has become unchemical.
Take care.
Oh, wow.
Oh, he’s such an amazing person.
Did he send you drafts of [music] sections of Pikal?
Oh, I saw the whole manuscript.
I said like I don’t think anybody wants to know about your sexual habits with Ann.
And he said, “Yeah, a lot of people mentioned that.” So, they took a lot of that out and most of it out.
There’s still a good bit in there.
She took the opportunity to really express [music] herself, shall we say?
It was pretty pretty racy before.
It remained very racy.
What evolutionary or biological reason would there be for such an effect to exist?
A psychedelic effect.
I don’t know that we have evolved to have that happen.
But if you look at where this 2A receptor is expressed, it’s on the cortical pyramidal cells, which are the major computational units in the brain.
So, all your subcortical stuff, all your unconscious stuff, your imagination, your memories, everything, that is all input into these cortical cells, which is processed.
You know, it’s something about the way the brain is structured.
The 2A [music] receptor is really an ancient receptor.
Serotonin 2 receptors go back into single cell [music] organisms.
Nature found something worked really well, so it kept it all the way up through the evolutionary chain.
The doses that produces psychedelic [music] effects are probably way higher than anything that would normally occur in the brain.
And so you’re really over driving.
You’re really turning on these receptors to a level that they wouldn’t normally or work.
And then you’re shutting down the filtering mechanisms that normally keep a lot of the subcortical stuff from [music] getting into the cortex.
Kind of like the on off switch on your TV set.
We enhance our consciousness [music] with LSD in order to further explore intuition [music] and the flow state and mystical experience.
Whatever.
Taking acid and going for a walk around the park and deciding how do you resolve the crisis of the ego?
That was our game.
We used to just play largely to think better.
I think it’s your move.
Okay, so I’ve played.
Okay, so let’s start.
Enjoy.
And a very good test of one’s thinking was playing Go.
If I was high on LSD with the right sugar level, [music] suddenly you’d see things and you just know that’s the next move.
You didn’t have to think about it.
It was just intuitive.
I’ll be greedy, but I’m spring eternal.
All right, here we go.
Ooh, the nerves attached.
Ooh.
It’s very close to being [music] a good very good move.
So I’m I’m a little bit nervous.
Yeah, it’s very close to being a good No, it’s it may it’s one move away from being a disaster is what I [music] was is what I mean by that.
It’s well known that people are worried about the use of drugs as as performance enhancers in chess, but there’s been some discussion of that in Go playing and and all the the sort of popular evidence is in Go playing nothing makes you play better.
[laughter] Go more intuitive.
I think so.
Pattern recognition.
Yes, indeed.
One things I used to feel about a lot of strong go players, they would write these books, why am I such a brilliant go player?
Buy my book, you’ll understand, right?
Of course, they couldn’t tell you the whole truth cuz they couldn’t actually say what was really going on.
It’s really like saying, what’s it like to to feel that you’re in love?
If you try to explain that to someone who’s never been in love at all, they haven’t got a clue.
And if you try to explain to someone else who’s been in love, you’ll probably find their idea of being in love and yours are not the same anyway.
But they’ve got a glimmering.
It’s that sort of feeling with all of our thinking.
I think it’s two things that have no business being together are brought together and zing, something magical comes about.
All of this stuff is happening in a non-verbal domain.
If I had hypothetically taken LSD, I might say that the amount I took is just right.
Just the right amount of LSD.
Any more would have been too much.
Any less would have been not enough.
That That was our room in in back [music] room where I still live.
This was a tiny little room which very often had about a great many people in it.
And that’s in that spot from that period.
Uh this rather clever but not attractive character who turned leery, funny enough, onto LSD.
Michael Hollingshead, he was hanging around my flat.
He uh he had a bottle of LSD which he got from Sandals.
It was famous for its size.
And [snorts] he poured it into my coffee.
So I had a as bad an experience as more or less one can have.
Why would he do that to you?
What?
Why would Hollingshead do that to you?
Um to take a photograph of the children.
Oh god.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jesus.
Yeah.
And so that that was very damaging.
But that’s life, isn’t it?
I mean, life comes with all sorts of traumas.
And so that slightly frightened me off LSD, and I came back here actually and lived in a hut beyond the orchard for months.
Then a very nice friend came by and said, “You must come.
There’s a party in London.
Ravi Shankar is playing on the river.
La la la.
Do you know?
Fun fun fun.
What are you doing?” So then I went, and there I met Bart.
And then we started to love.
It was obviously we were going to be partners.
Why didn’t he continue working with less invasive techniques for altering blood flow to the brain like standing on your head or even laying down in a bed or Um standing on your head needs a lot of muscular [laughter] control and discipline and all those sort of things.
And well, trepanation is not easy.
No, I agree.
You made this amazing film, Heartbeat in the Brain, but you wanted to wait until you had some scientific validation of Ideally, that’s what I would do.
Yeah.
I’ll tell you, I only did it actually for at the end for intellectual curiosity in the sense that um it’s a very fascinating hypothesis.
I haven’t seen the film for 10 years or shown it to anyone.
I’m not good at machines.
I can figure it out probably.
I want to make sure we edit the kind of bloody bits.
Okay.
Uh do you see what I mean?
I feel I understand.
I will say that it’s going to be difficult to present it in a way that a certain type of person won’t be shocked by it.
Yeah, I don’t want to kind of upset [clears throat] the boat.
I understand.
Cuz I’ve got all the LSD research I wanted to.
I’ve got all the family research.
You know, I’ve got several big projects, a clinic and a lab, all of which I’m going to get going.
So, I don’t want to kind of go and that hurt the little They think I’ve got to lose.
Okay, is there any introductory thing that you [music] think should be said?
Um just that I’m absolutely not in favor of self-trepanation.
It’s absolutely not a thing for lay people to do.
[music] Maybe it’s better to say it’s a film about my beloved bard.
[music] This is me looking rather anxious.
It’s the morning of the operation.
Here’s Birdy who lives with us.
[music] This is an old skull.
An Irishman, I believe, in his day, which I practice drilling on.
I decided to make the hole on the median line just above the hairline.
Here I’m lifting the instrument [music] out of the sterilizing fluid.
This is a bath cap I wore to keep my hair out of the way.
[music] The dark glasses I wore to keep the blood from dripping into my eyes.
I taped them to my forehead.
They have the effect of depersonalizing [music] me.
This gets a bit gory.
I think it should be This is an electric drill with a flexible drive.
I stop drilling every now and then to dip the drill head into distilled water to cool it.
There are three layers of bone to get through.
What one is doing in trepanation is removing a piece of bone from the skull.
One is not entering the brain.
The brain is soft like a pudding.
It became like [music] a piece of sponge.
Now, maybe one cut.
There was There was absolutely no pain, but the local anesthetic saw to that.
I mean Pretty amazing.
[laughter] I I really just love this.
I think it’s so amazing.
I I rather love it, too, you know.
It’s It is a masterpiece.
It’s truly a masterpiece.
Do you think so?
Absolutely.
It’s really well thought out.
But, you know, it looks a little mad.
I think if anything this has the opposite effect.
My thought is not this woman is mad, but this woman is an artist, and this woman is very brave.
I I just don’t want to ruin my chances of getting funding for the research I want to do.
Can Can we probably turn the cameras off till we get to the end?
Okay.
That sounds good to me.
Fast forwarding.
Fast forwarding.
Suddenly, it was through.
No more resistance.
The change was almost imperceptible.
Like the tide coming in.
It was a feeling of elation and relaxation.
Later in the evening, I noticed a silence in my head.
Having cleaned up and had a bath, we went out and had a steak for supper to make up for the lost blood and then went to a party we’d been asked to.
All this took place in 1970.
Now, 8 years later, I can say that the experience of it is as good, if not better, than I’d hoped.
I think the consequences of the operation the regaining of the lost energy and buoyancy of childhood, are advantages which should be made available to everyone.
Trepanation is the only way of permanently expanding consciousness.
I would correct that.
Look at that.
That’s unbelievable.
[laughter] Yeah, a bit.
Yeah, a bit.
It’s sad when you have compounds you’ve made and you’re using it.
It’s Well, you’re going to be tired.
What am I going to do with them?
I had to destroy all my schedule one stuff.
That’s horrible you had to destroy compounds that you synthesized?
[music] If they were controlled substances, yeah.
How did you destroy them?
Well, mostly [music] you just run them down the sink.
And you have to witnesses that say, “Yeah, I witnessed him destroying it.” That’s ridiculous.
What’s like an artist having to destroy all the work that they’ve made?
Well, we’ve got the archives at Purdue.
[music] You mentioned your contribution to these historically important [music] clinical experiments with psychedelics.
And then you’ve also made LSD for Brian Roth’s work [music] as well, right?
That’s true, yes.
Brian has had a long-standing interest in the serotonin 2A receptor.
[music] And he wanted to crystallize one of the serotonin receptors with LSD.
And he said, “Could you make some?” I said, “I can make some for you.” And now he’s trying to take that to a new frontier with I think he calls it ultra LSD.
Is that [music] the name of his project?
I don’t know.
You’ll You’ll have to ask him about that.
I don’t know about ultra LSD.
My mom had schizophrenia [music] and had her first break when I was uh probably five or six.
Obviously, [music] that had a big effect on me.
One of the main goals of our research has been to find better [music] drugs for treating schizophrenia.
The serotonin [music] receptor I study, 5HT2A, you know, it’s known to be a target for psychedelics.
[music] There’s no question.
And also, some of the most effective drugs in treating schizophrenia block the activity.
That in itself has [music] been, you know, really intriguing to me.
How can, you know, one receptor, you activate it, [music] and you know, people have this literally mind-blowing experience.
When you block it, uh some people with schizophrenia [music] get a lot better.
Um And why that is, we don’t know.
I haven’t cured schizophrenia.
Solve this.
This is big.
I told Dave, our work is done, Dave.
So, basically, the idea is we have [music] this virtual library of small drug-like molecules, which now uh my collaborator tells me is 34 billion compounds.
[music] So, it’s this huge universe of chemical scaffolds.
And through the computer, [music] basically, you can take each of those compounds in and see if if it fits in the receptor.
So, for the 5-HT2A receptor, for instance, [music] our goal is to come up with 100,000 novel scaffolds.
It would be amazing.
We can do it.
We’re doing it.
With the characterization of the 5-HT2A receptor, Roth has begun the in silico [music] screening of millions of virtual drugs on a virtual receptor.
1,500 parallel processors [music] that may exceed the output of all the medicinal chemists and pharmacologists in the world.
Should Roth succeed, the product will be countless novel psychedelic [music] scaffolds that may be more potent than the lysergamides.
He dubs this process or ultra LSD.
We have some now they’re nothing like [music] anything you’ve ever seen before.
I can say that.
That’s very exciting. about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
[music] With the careful use of a psychedelic you can change your internal setting so that you’re right up there.
I’m very excited about the future.
I think we’re at an amazing point.
Because now we’ve moved to the next stage in the game.
Science has replaced religion as the code of behavior [music] or code of belief.
It’s quite a false god in many ways.
At the same time it’s quite a useful tool to explore.
How do these things change [music] our very basic consciousness?
Birdy was my simple consciousness.
And I’m very excited for the future.
Birdy loved one when one was high.
He loved anyone who’s [music] high.
People they get much more into the flow, animal flows, and he sensed [music] that completely.
People who had that integration with nature.
Could you tell me [music] just a little bit about what happened to Birdy?
I think I knew he was going to die before he died.
It was an accident waiting to happen in a sense.
I always [snorts] feared it would happen.
I I I I used to love to paint.
And I was where we lived in those days up the hill in the farmhouse painting.
And suddenly I got this kind of flash of Buddy’s dead.
I stopped painting and went looking for him down the hill here to the side where my parents were.
We were directed or someone was directed to his body within kind of 10 minutes [music] of being hidden in a great pile of nettles.
And I knew he had died and [music] had come down from the house I lived in to here looking for him.
Uh it gave me an absolute knowledge that telepathy exists.
But it’s too complicated story to tell.
What happened to him?
His neck was broken, basically.
We know who it was, probably.
Was Buddy murdered?
Certain remarks were made so that it was fairly obvious it was.
That’s life.
A mixture of madness and chance.
I always felt he was doomed to be murdered.
But the person who was responsible never confessed to having done it?
No.
Jesus, there was something rather magnificent and tragic about him.
North Dakota is the number one producer of hard red spring wheat in the US.
So, here in West North Dakota, we grow a lot of wheat.
There’s a lot of different diseases that impact wheat.
Ergot is one of them.
The best we can do is manage our ditches, manage our weeds to make sure it doesn’t spread into the field.
There’s no economically viable fungicides for it.
If your ergot is too high, they’re not going to take it at the elevator.
When you’re going to have disease in a wheat plant or any other crop, you need to have three things, right?
So, you have your pathogen, you have your host, and then you have the right environment.
Ergot likes wetter conditions.
Last year we actually had a pretty big epidemic of ergots in central North Dakota.
I read about that.
Yeah.
Why?
We had [music] wet conditions during flowering.
Depending on the field, there are some that have more, there’s some that have less, but generally every year you’re going to find some ergot along the edges.
Can we look around?
Yeah, let’s go look for some.
Okay.
We have the right conditions for growth out here.
A lot of residue.
All right, so we actually have some ergot right here.
Each of these little spikelets has a seed in it.
This one flowered and instead of it growing [music] grain, it grew this fungus.
So, you pull that out there.
So, instead of growing into [music] this, it grows into this.
So, we got another ergot right here.
How much ergot you got?
We got two on this head.
Oh, wow.
That’s amazing.
We should leave some of these.