Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [9]
Here is how he describes his Eureka moment:
I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it: you know, I wasn’t stoned on LSD but my mind by then had learned how to get down there. I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymerase go by … that’s just the way I think. I can put myself in all kinds of spots and I’ve learned that, partially I would think … through psychedelic drugs.
Mullis has always been open about his use of hallucinogens. He tried LSD for the first time in 1966, just a few months before it was made illegal in the United States. When the ban came into force, he and a few colleagues began to synthesise and use hallucinogens that were still legal. Mullis believes that drugs are an invaluable tool for opening the mind to otherwise inaccessible insights. In a BBC documentary, he makes it clear where his debt lies. ‘What if I had not taken LSD ever: would I have still invented PCR?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.’ Taking LSD was ‘a mind-opening experience … much more important than any courses I ever took.’
He is far from alone in this. If you use an Apple computer or iPod, or play computer games, or have ever had to submit DNA for forensic or medical testing, you have benefited from the drug’s unique properties. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, calls his experience with LSD ‘one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life’. The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick was ‘fascinated by its effects’ during his acid trips. And most of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were regular users.
In 1991, a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner visited Siggraph, the world’s biggest meeting of computer graphics engineers. The convention is held every year in California and draws everybody in the business. During the event, the reporter asked 180 of these top-flight professionals two questions: Do you take psychedelics? If yes, is this important in your work? Every one of them answered yes to both.
The investigation had been prompted by an article that came out in that July’s GQ magazine. It was entitled ‘Valley of the Nerds’, and described widespread drug use among the pioneers of computer graphics. The writer quoted Chip Krauskorp, then head of Intel’s Human Interface Program. Intel was happy to employ drugusers, said Krauskorp, because they were ‘very, very, very bright’ and gifted workers. The fact that they used psychedelic drugs, or cannabis, was not an issue; Intel even helped them get through the company’s drug-testing procedures.
The work of some Californian mathematicians was also druginspired. Ralph Abraham, now an emeritus professor of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, described himself in the GQ article as ‘a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community’. He later explained that he was a professor at Princeton in 1967 when he first tried LSD. His positive experiences prompted the move to California and eventually led him to work on the mathematics of computer graphics, then chaos theory and fractal geometry. ‘There is no doubt,’ Abraham says, ‘that the psychedelic revolution in the 1960s had a profound effect on the history of computers and computer graphics, and of mathematics.’
In April 2008, the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen announced on his blog that scientists were about to be forced to undergo anti-doping blood tests. The US National Institutes of Health, he said, was seeking to curb the growing problem of ‘brain-boosting’ drugs that enabled scientists to think more clearly in the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs. Eisen quoted an NIH official