see, mom?

[phorbesie]

Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD when he discovered the

secret of life

Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Mail on Sunday (London)

August 8, 2004

BY ALUN REES

FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was

under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix

structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

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 was 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 in Wales 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 circle 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 2.5 million 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 Harker, 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 shape 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.'

[Im going home Donny]

thnx for postin that Phorbs.