Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Mail on Sunday (London)

August 8, 2004

SECTION: FB; Pg. 44; Pg. 45

LENGTH: 758 words

HEADLINE: Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD when he discovered
the secret of life

BYLINE: ALUN REES

BODY:


FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was
under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix
structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-
researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in
March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of
bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist
that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used
in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD,
not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure
of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist
Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another
hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception
and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the ! hippies of the
Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick wa s a founder
member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in
Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous
letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.

It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became
the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the
world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote
farmhouse inWales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of
the late Seventies.

Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The
revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of
freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD
guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to
discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient
of cannabis.

It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social cir! cle that attracted a
brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert
to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to
the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's
first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp
went into business, manufacturing 'acid' in a succession of rented
houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside
near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated
that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5million an astonishing
amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977
and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two
million LSD 'tabs'.

The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-
conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the
case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's
close friend, Garrod Harke! r, whose home had been raided by police
but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his
girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who
were completely uninterested in the money they were making.

They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop
festival and the drugs charity Release.

'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe
industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the
answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD
can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on
self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.

'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told
him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a
thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their
genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived
the double-helix sha! pe while on LSD.

'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled
over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick,
who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it
was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.'
Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in
Cambridge.

He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the
role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no
intimation of surprise.

When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'