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Cycling home from the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in 1943, the Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann found himself on the trip of his life. The familiar route had unexpectedly been transformed into an undulating boulevard like a Salvador Dali painting, fringed by buildings that yawned and rippled, "as if seen in a curved mirror".

This was not a fantastical dream, but the result of a rather unorthodox experiment. Five years earlier, in a search for novel therapeutic agents to treat migraines, Hofmann had combined an ergot alkaloid, lysergic acid, with a diethylamine building block to create the 25th molecule in a series of lysergic acid compounds. At the time, pharmacological assessment of the new molecule, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), had revealed nothing of interest.

Hofmann did not realise he had stumbled upon a compound with mind-altering properties that would change both the scientific and social world until he resynthesised the substance on April 16, 1943 and accidentally absorbed some through his skin. Intrigued by the effects he experienced, Hofmann ran a series of experiments on himself, starting with the famous bicycle 'trip'. He took 0.25 milligrams of LSD — which he believed to be a miniscule dose. Today it is known that one-thousandth of that amount is enough to produce psychedelic effects.

The first experiment immersed Hofmann in an enchanting world of perceptual distortions in which objects morphed into surreal images, and sounds transposed into colourful kaleidoscopic visions. But the inner distortion of his mind reached such frightening proportions that Hofmann feared for his sanity and his life.

"Familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms. Every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be wasted effort," Hofmann wrote in his 1980 seminal work, LSD: My Problem Child. "A demon had invaded me. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him… my body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying?

"Another reflection took shape, an idea full of bitter irony: if I was now forced to leave this world prematurely, it was because of this lysergic acid diethylamide that I myself had brought forth into the world."

Hofmann had not only brought forth a new drug, he had given birth to a new field of scientific research — psychedelic medicine — which scientists and physicians of the day embraced with great enthusiasm.

Barely able to believe Hofmann's reports of the drug's vivid effects, Ernst Rothlin, the director of the pharmacology department at Sandoz at the time, and two colleagues, conducted similar self-experimentation using one third of Hofmann's dose. Rothlin too found himself plunged into a world that the Beatles famously described as full of "tangerine trees and marmalade skies". His experience included frightening demonic twists and turns of his mind They agreed that LSD, the hallucinogenic effects of which can last for 6 to 12 hours, had extraordinary potency.

Believing LSD could be of great value to psychiatry, Sandoz made the drug readily available to scientific and clinical investigators for medical research under the trade name Delysid.

THE FLURRY OF RESEARCH that ensued suggested that LSD might encourage the release of memories or reveal the unconscious in psychoanalysis; or help psychotherapy patients to reach new levels of self-awareness. Many psychiatrists were encouraged to take the drug to enable them to subjectively understand schizophrenia or share psychedelic experiences with their patients.

Patients were given LSD for conditions ranging from anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression and bereavement to sexual dysfunction. The early literature even describes attempts to fix what was termed 'frigidity', using LSD to release repressed memories of abuse, while noting that the compound accentuated anxiety in some patients.

Inevitably, LSD escaped from the lab. As the drug counter-culture gathered momentum in the 1960s, the boundary between scientific inquiry and the quest for 'spiritual enlightenment' began to blur — and the scientific community distanced itself from the drug.

One of the best-known catalysts in this transition was Timothy Leary, a doctoral psychologist from Harvard University, who turned LSD from a scientific interest into a cult. Recruiting Harvard students as disciples, Leary's clinical LSD experiments at Harvard in the 1960s attracted more willing participants than could be accommodated, creating a black market for the drug on campus among those who missed out.

By 1967, Leary had abandoned any pretense to scientific research. To a gathering of 30,000 hippies at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, he prescribed the catch phrase, "turn on, tune in, drop out".

As LSD became increasingly associated with drug abuse, student riots and anti-war demonstrations, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) moved swiftly to classify LSD as a Schedule 1 drug under the Federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Worldwide prohibition followed in 1971.

Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman with a model of the LSD molecule.

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