Topic
Experiments that gave psychedelics to animals, from laboratory pharmacology to John Lilly's dolphins.
A newspaper report that NASA had given John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute an $80,700 contract to study communication between humans and dolphins. It shows the space-age funding behind the dolphin research that later included Lilly's LSD experiments.
A pharmacologist at St Thomas's Hospital reports systematic experiments on Anhalonium alkaloids using frogs, cats, dogs, and rabbits, combined with self-experimentation. Dixon's account is more clinically restrained than Weir Mitchell's or Ellis's but adds music-color synaesthesia and comparisons to cannabis and strychnine.
Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin announces his isolation of banisterine from Banisteria caapi and its identity to harmine. He describes animal experiments and preliminary human trials showing that banisterine relieved the muscular rigidity of encephalitis lethargica (post-influenza sleeping sickness).
A reel-to-reel tape made on April 19, 1965, at John C. Lilly's Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas, with the sounds of the dolphin Peter after he was given LSD; Lilly can also be heard. Stanford University Libraries digitized the tape in 2014.
Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin (1850–1929) reports on "Muscale Buttons" received from Parke, Davis & Co. during a visit to the United States in 1887. The botanist Paul Hennings identified the dried cactus as a new species and named it Anhalonium Lewinii after him, and Lewin describes a crude base he called anhalonine and its strychnine-like convulsant effects in frogs, pigeons and rabbits. Hosted here are the introduction, the preliminary chemistry, and the full section on the drug's effects, with the historical survey of cacti omitted.