'Shroom Science: Safe & Effective? Smart?

In my column in this month's issue of The Scientist I argue that perhaps we are moving just a bit too fast in bringing back research on hallucinogens, and that learning the lessons of history about how that research led to pseudoscience and then to broader and dangerous abuse is very, very important - particularly given the effects should a media explosion lead to the impression that large and important medical institutions are engaged in drug pushing of psilocybin and other compounds (like LSD):

In the August issue of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers published a study in which some subjects were given psilocybin and then asked to relate their experiences. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona published in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry his patients' reports that psilocybin helped them with migraine headaches. Harbor-UCLA Medical Center psychiatrist Charles Grob told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he is giving the compound to patients dying of cancer to see whether it eases pain by relieving anxiety.

The study of so-called magic mushrooms isn't new; it could be argued that it is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It began, as best anyone can tell, when Wall Street banker R. Gordon Wasson documented his trip to a healer in Oaxaca, Mexico, whose brew, he claimed, enabled him to see the reality of ideas and concepts. His 1957 essay in Life magazine excited the imaginations of scientists around the world. Sandoz patented the two active chemicals in the mushrooms, calling the compounds psilocin and psilocybin. Chaos ensued as researchers struggled to do excellent scientific work using a family of substances whose effects - to put it mildly - were not easily measurable using the tools of the time.

The scientists who used psilocybin in their research in the 1960s poked at the nature of consciousness, but this particular compound just refused to be caged by ordinary scientific conventions. Paper after paper stabbed at descriptions of the effects and utility of psilocybin, but scalar measures of transcendence just could not capture its effects, or side effects. A few of the leading scientists engaged in its study, most notoriously Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, simply abandoned the strictures of scientific research as insufficient to grasp the power of psilocybin.

By the time the FDA banned hallucinogenic drugs in 1970, the majority of those experimenting with mushrooms were not in universities...

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Pigs Need Never Die Again

Hopkins reported Tuesday that its cardiology department and stem cell group successfully achieved full or near full recovery in pigs who had had heart attacks, using transplants of stem cells from the bone marrow. Cells had not been redifferentiated to colonies of heart muscle cells, but rather differentiated themselves in the pig heart. No word on how they recruited pigs with heart problems to the study.

Hopkins' Berman Institute now a Funding Priority

As if they didn't have enough money at Hopkins, one of the best bioethics research organizations around, Johns Hopkins Gazette reports that the Berman Bioethics Institute is a funding priority in a current capital project. The goal? New better digs in an expanded nursing building. Given that Hopkins was the first to raise $1.5 billion in a single campaign, you can bet that the Hopkins bioethics folks will have the best physical facility around pretty soon.