...the primitive conditions under which medicinal chemists worked in the 1940's. (Modern chemists would be appalled; using a hood was considered as being for "sissies," by his boss.)
Nevertheless, he was surprised to have been contaminated by the compound, which led him to recognize how low the dose was, when he deliberately ingested some of it the next day, a quantity he thought could not possibly have effect, but would be considered a high dose today.
LSD, My Problem Child.
If I recall correctly - I'm not entirely sure I do - he used azide chemistry via a hydrazide intermediate to couple the lysergic acid to diethylamine. Hopefully he was working with small quantities. Azide chemistry can be dangerous.
All of this did not seem to effect his life span. He lived to be 102.
I haven't looked at the book in many years, but I know it's somewhere on my shelves.
He was studying ergot alkaloids and their derivatives for the purpose of exploiting their use in inducing labor in pregnant women. If I recall, the lysergic acid starting material was isolated from ergot itself.
A total synthesis of enantiomerically pure lysergic acid is found here: Liu, Qiang, Zhang, Yu An, Xu, Ping,Jia, Yanxing, Total Synthesis of(+)Lysergic Acid 2013 J. Org. Chem.78, 21, 10885-10893. (Don't try this at home.) I would have thought that the synthesis would have started from tryptophan (which is likely the starting material in biosynthesis) but apparently, although the authors tried that approach, it is not.
It may be the primitive conditions under which he worked that led him to discover LSD's remarkable hallucinogenic properties. If I recall from the book, which I read probably decades ago, he considered himself very cautious in the lab with respect to contamination, and was surprised by his unintended "trip," and thus, again, went back to deliberately take what he considered a tiny dose, which proved to be a stronger dose than what is found in street drugs, shocking him.
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