LSD and the Double Helix

[ParappaTheRapper]

What is the connection between LSD and DNA? I've heard this spoken about but I dont fully understand..?

 

[Doldrugs]

The structure of DNA was discovered/deduced under the influence of LSD.

 

[Vurtual]

I heard from somewhere unreliable that francis crick thought up dna structure while on acid (i was going to make some comment about how it didn't cure his 'scientific' racism (and that he pinched part of the dna structure from a woman scientist)); i think the francis crick bit is urban legend (though he did take lsd). This is a copy/paste from some forum i just looked at that clarified the confusion a bit for me (leave it to you to further google/startpage)

...whoever made this comment could be confusing their stories - the man who essentially invented polymerase chain reaction (a hugely important technique for copying fragments of DNA), Kary Mullis, claimed that his conception of the technique was inspired by LSD. It's a pretty big deal - maybe not as celebrated as the development of the double helix model, but one of the most important techniques in modern biology, and he won the Nobel Prize for it also.

Obviously I can't be sure, but I'm guessing this is just a mixup of the two stories.

Here's another link about the crick/lsd link: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/publications/francis-crick-discoverer-of-the-genetic-code.aspx

 

[spacejunk]

^ interesting, thanks for that.
I always thought there must be more to that story.
It being something of an urban (or online) myth doesn't surprise me.

 

[Torresmo]

Graham Hancock affirms that (among other things) in this interview:

 

[pupnik]

actually crick did lsd and claimed it helped work out the structure of DNA
ok
maybe
it does help get the mind into a state which can sustain multiple simultaneous images and activities overlaid into a single cohesive experience so why not complete your mental synthesis that you have been working on day and night in the lab.

otherwise
spirals are cool, lsd is cool, life is cool, dna is about life and genetics and it has a helical molecular structure which is a spiral and that's cool so...
far out man...

 

[zn13bt]

(i was going to make some comment about how it didn't cure his 'scientific' racism

You're confusing Francis Crick with his collaborator, James Watson.

otherwise
spirals are cool, lsd is cool, life is cool, dna is about life and genetics and it has a helical molecular structure which is a spiral and that's cool so...
far out man...

A little while ago I was playing with an Oculus Rift demo when it suddenly crashed and I saw these red and green helices all around me, and I was like, I'm seeing the DNA of the Matrix! (the moral here is, don't mess with electronic equipment while on dissociatives, they tend to go haywire)

 

[max_freakout]

DNA has nothing to do with LSD

actually crick did lsd and claimed it helped work out the structure of DNA

The whole story that Francis Crick discovered the DNA double Helix under the influence of LSD is just a myth/lie which has been retold as a fact so many times that many people believe it, however in fact Crick did not take LSD for the first time until many years after he discovered DNA. His discovery of LSd was therefore entirely unconnected from his use of LSD, contrary to popular (uncritical, unverified) opinion.

I am frequently asked for my opinion on the speculation that Francis Crick was on LSD when he discovered the double helix; or that he was involved with a man named Dick Kemp in the manufacture of LSD. These assertions were reported second hand in an article in the Mail on Sunday by Alun Rees following Crick's death and they have since gained a certain amount of traction on the internet. Both stories are wrong. The true story, which I was told directly by Crick's widow and by the man who (as his widow confirms) first supplied the Cricks with LSD, is much less sensational. Crick was given (not sold) LSD on several occasions from 1967 onwards by Henry Todd, who met the Cricks through his girlfriend. Todd did know Kemp, with whom he was eventually prosecuted, but the Cricks did not. As for the implausible idea that the then impoverished and conventional Crick would have had access to LSD when it was newly invented in the early 1950s, there is simply no evidence for it at all. Those who wish to argue that LSD helped Crick make discoveries should note that all his major breakthroughs in molecular biology were made before 1967

 

[Vurtual]

You're confusing Francis Crick with his collaborator, James Watson...

Oops, sorry frank. Teach me to check the bollocks i write here (though i did check about the lsd). Modern dna research has made that sort of eugenic thinking a lot more difficult to sustain anyway, what with epigenetics, and 'junk' dna turning out to expand the function of dna into a complex living network rather than just a passive strip of code which can be easily edited (basically, we still don't know enough about it to claim we can fix it )