Albert Hofmann: Life and Career

Table of Contents

1. Childhood in Baden
2. Apprenticeship and the Path to University
3. A Doctorate on Snails and Chitin
4. Joining Sandoz in 1929
5. Squill and the Cardiac Glycosides
6. Arthur Stoll and the Ergot Programme
7. Head of the Natural Products Department
8. Writer and Traveller After Retirement
9. Honours and the Centenary
10. Death at 102 and How He Is Remembered
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections

1. Childhood in Baden

Albert Hofmann was born on 11 January 1906 in Baden, a small spa town in the Swiss canton of Aargau, on the river Limmat north-west of Zurich. His father, Adolf Hofmann, was a toolmaker; his mother was Elisabeth Hofmann, née Schenk. The Chimia obituary written by the chemists Nathaniel Finney and Jay Siegel describes him as “the eldest of the four children of a toolmaker”, and the University of Zurich’s own obituary gives the same picture of a working family of modest means.

Very little that can be checked has been published about his early schooling. What the sources agree on is the shape of the family’s situation: a skilled tradesman’s household with four children, in which the eldest son was expected, sooner rather than later, to help earn the family’s living. That expectation would decide the next stage of his life, and it explains why the future professor of natural-product chemistry reached university several years later than most of his classmates.

Baden itself has a long history as a place of healing waters. Hofmann’s own later books contain memories of his boyhood there; they are not repeated here because they come from his recollection rather than from an independent record.

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2. Apprenticeship and the Path to University

When Hofmann’s father fell ill, the family needed another wage. According to both the Chimia and the University of Zurich obituaries, the teenage Albert set aside formal schooling and took a commercial apprenticeship — an office and business training rather than an academic one — so that he could help support his parents and younger siblings.

He did not give up on learning. The same obituaries record that during the apprenticeship he kept up his Latin and his languages in his own time. With the help of an anonymous benefactor he was then able to attend a private school in Zurich and pass the Matura, the Swiss school-leaving examination that opens the door to university. He was about twenty years old when he finished it — late by the standards of the time, and a sign of how much effort the step had cost.

The detour meant that Hofmann began university at about twenty, after several years of paid work. A readiness to return to unfinished work shows again later in his career: in the spring of 1943, by his own account, he made LSD-25 a second time, five years after the compound had been set aside.

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3. A Doctorate on Snails and Chitin

In 1926 Hofmann began studying chemistry at the University of Zurich under Professor Paul Karrer. Karrer was then building one of Europe’s leading laboratories for the chemistry of natural substances; in 1937 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on carotenoids, flavins and vitamins (his part in the riboflavin story is told on the site’s Vitamin B2 history page). Studying under him placed the young Hofmann in exactly the kind of research world — molecules taken from living things, purified and identified — that would occupy the rest of his career.

The thesis

The Chimia obituary gives the title of his thesis as “On the Enzymatic Degradation of Chitin and Chitosan”. Chitin is the tough material of insect skeletons, crab and lobster shells and the cell walls of fungi. Hofmann used crude extracts from the edible snail Helix pomatia (the Roman or Burgundy snail), whose digestive juices can break chitin down, and prepared from them one of the first preparations of the enzyme chitinase. With it he showed that chitin is a polymer — a long chain — built from repeated units of the sugar N-acetylglucosamine.

The same building block later became familiar to the public in a very different setting, as the shellfish-derived compound behind glucosamine supplements; the site’s history of glucosamine covers that later story. For Hofmann the thesis was a first exercise in what would become his method: start from a natural material, use biology to take it apart, and work out the chemistry of the pieces.

The obituaries state that he completed the doctorate with distinction after four years of study. The exact year printed in different sources varies slightly, but they agree that the degree was finished by the time he went to Basel in the spring of 1929.

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4. Joining Sandoz in 1929

In the spring of 1929 Hofmann joined the pharmaceutical-chemical research laboratory of Sandoz in Basel, then led by the chemist Arthur Stoll. In his own account of how LSD came about, Hofmann says he chose this laboratory because it offered research on natural products — the active substances of medicinal plants — whereas two other job offers he had from Basel chemical firms involved synthetic chemistry. The Chimia obituary makes the same point.

Stoll’s department had been built on exactly that idea. A decade earlier Stoll had isolated ergotamine, the first chemically pure alkaloid from ergot, and his laboratory had become known for taking traditional plant drugs, finding the single substance responsible for their action, and producing it in pure, measurable form. For a young chemist trained by Karrer this was a natural fit: the work was close to academic natural-product chemistry, but aimed at medicines.

Hofmann stayed with the same employer for his entire career, from 1929 until his retirement in 1971 — a span of some forty-two years. He is named here as a matter of record; this page does not assess the company itself.

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5. Squill and the Cardiac Glycosides

Hofmann’s first research project in Basel was not ergot but squill. Mediterranean squill, or sea onion (Scilla maritima, also classified as Urginea), is a large bulb that grows along Mediterranean coasts. It has been used since antiquity as a heart and dropsy remedy, and also as a rat poison, because it contains powerful heart-acting compounds called cardiac glycosides — the same broad family as the foxglove compounds behind digitalis, whose story is told on the William Withering page.

A glycoside is made of a sugar part and a non-sugar part, the aglycone, which carries most of the biological activity. Hofmann worked on the structure of the squill glycosides and, according to his own account and the Chimia obituary, showed that the squill aglycone belongs to a group related to the toxins found in toad skin, and is chemically distinct from the aglycones of Digitalis, on which he also worked. That distinction mattered to chemists because it showed that two old heart remedies, foxglove and sea onion, achieve similar effects with different molecular frameworks.

The squill work taught Hofmann the practical skills of natural-product chemistry: extracting and separating closely related compounds from a crude plant material, splitting off sugars, and identifying a structure from small amounts of substance. Those skills were exactly what the next project demanded.

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6. Arthur Stoll and the Ergot Programme

Ergot is the dark resting body of the fungus Claviceps purpurea, which grows on rye and other grasses. For centuries it caused epidemics of poisoning, but midwives also used it to speed childbirth, and by the twentieth century chemists had begun to isolate its active alkaloids. Stoll’s isolation of ergotamine in 1918 made the Basel laboratory one of the main centres of that work. The history of the fungus, the poisoning epidemics and the medicines is told in full on the page Ergot Medicines and the Discovery of LSD.

In the 1930s Hofmann moved from squill to ergot within Stoll’s department. Working on the common chemical core of the ergot alkaloids, lysergic acid, he achieved in 1938, with Stoll, the partial synthesis of ergobasine (ergometrine) — the natural ergot alkaloid that contracts the womb — by joining lysergic acid to a small amino-alcohol. The method opened the way to new variants, among them methylergometrine, which became a widely used medicine for bleeding after childbirth, and to a series of lysergic acid amides. The twenty-fifth of these, made in 1938, was lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD-25; its effects on the mind were discovered only in April 1943.

The historian of ergot M. R. Lee wrote that the history of ergot between 1940 and 1980 “was dominated by two investigators, Arthur Stoll and Albert Hofmann”. The working relationship was long and close: Stoll was the head of the department and the senior author on many of the papers, and Hofmann the chemist at the bench who carried much of the synthetic work. Their joint papers in the late 1930s and 1940s appear under both names.

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7. Head of the Natural Products Department

Hofmann’s career inside the company followed a steady path. The Chimia obituary describes him as first a co-worker of Stoll, then a group leader, and finally head of the department of natural products, the position he held when he retired in 1971. The Economist’s obituary likewise calls him head of the natural products division.

Over these decades his research produced the discoveries named on the other pages of this wing:

• the hydrogenated ergot alkaloids, such as dihydroergotamine and dihydroergotoxine, which became medicines for circulation, blood pressure and migraine (Ergot Medicines and the Discovery of LSD);
• the isolation of psilocybin in 1958 from the Mexican mushroom Psilocybe mexicana, its structure and synthesis later that year, and the identification of psilocin in 1959 (Psilocybin, Psilocin and the Morning Glory Seeds);
• the discovery in 1960, with Hans Tscherter, that the Mexican morning-glory seeds called ololiuqui contain lysergic acid alkaloids — ergot-type compounds that until then had been known only from fungi (same page).

Family life

According to standard biographical summaries, Hofmann married Anita Guanella in 1935 and the couple had four children. Anita Hofmann appears in his own account of the 1962 field journey to Mexico, on which she travelled with him. Beyond these facts the sources used for this page say little about his private life, and this page does not add to them.

A private journey to Mexico

In 1962 Hofmann, his wife, the writer and banker R. Gordon Wasson and the ethnologist Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson travelled to the Mazatec region of Oaxaca in Mexico. The Chimia obituary stresses that this trip was a private journey made on his own time, not a company project; the chemical work on the mushrooms and seeds had been done in the Basel laboratory in the preceding years. The journey is described on the mushrooms and morning glory seeds page.

Over his working life he published more than a hundred scientific articles, according to the Chimia obituary, and in 1964 a monograph on the ergot alkaloids, Die Mutterkornalkaloide.

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8. Writer and Traveller After Retirement

Hofmann retired in 1971 and lived for almost four more decades. In those years he became an author for general readers as well as for chemists. In 1978 he published a historical survey of the ergot alkaloids in the journal Pharmacology, in which he wrote that, once “a dreaded poison”, ergot had become “a rich treasure house of valuable pharmaceuticals”. In 1979 he gave his own account of the 1938 synthesis and the 1943 discovery in the article “How LSD originated”.

The books

The best known of his books is LSD — mein Sorgenkind (1979), published in English in 1980 as LSD: My Problem Child in a translation by Jonathan Ott. The title itself expresses his mixed feelings: the substance he had discovered as a pharmacologist’s research tool had become, in his words, a “problem child”. The book retells the laboratory story, the mushroom and morning-glory research and the 1962 journey, and adds his reflections on nature and perception. A collection of essays, Einsichten und Ausblicke, followed in 1986.

His view of his discovery

The Chimia obituary records that Hofmann consistently stressed the importance of LSD as a tool for understanding the mind rather than as a recreational drug, and that he regretted that the cult which grew up around it in the 1960s led to the ban on scientific research. The historian M. R. Lee adds, at second hand, that Hofmann “would say later, in private, that he regretted having spent so much time on the compound”. How the research halted and later resumed is covered on the Legacy and Later Research page.

In retirement he lived in Burg im Leimental, a village in the canton of Basel-Landschaft close to the French border. Anniversaries of his work — such as the fiftieth anniversary of the 1943 discovery, marked in the pharmacy-history literature by the article “LSD at 50: Albert Hofmann and his discovery” — brought renewed attention to him.

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9. Honours and the Centenary

Hofmann received honorary doctorates from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, from the Free University of Berlin and from a university in Stockholm, according to the Chimia and University of Zurich obituaries. (The sources differ on which Stockholm institution it was, so it is left unnamed here.) For a chemist who had spent his career in an industrial laboratory rather than a university chair, these were notable signs of academic recognition.

The 100th birthday

His hundredth birthday in January 2006 was marked in Switzerland as a national occasion. The Chimia obituary reports that the Swiss Federal President, Moritz Leuenberger, conveyed the nation’s thanks and described him — in Chimia’s paraphrase — as the greatest researcher of the human psyche. An international symposium was held in Basel from 13 to 15 January 2006 under the title “LSD — miracle drug and problem child”, echoing the title of his book.

The centenary fell in the years when small, regulated clinical studies of psilocybin, and later of LSD, were resuming after a gap of decades. Their results — including trials whose main outcome was not statistically significant — are reported on the Legacy and Later Research page.

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10. Death at 102 and How He Is Remembered

Albert Hofmann died on 29 April 2008 at his home in Burg im Leimental, in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, at the age of 102. The date is given as 29 April by the Chimia obituary, The Economist and other standard sources; one university web page gives 28 April, but the later date is the one most widely recorded.

The obituaries

His death was marked by obituaries across the range of fields his work had touched. Chemists wrote in Chimia, the journal of the Swiss Chemical Society. The natural-products journal Planta Medica published an obituary by the pharmacognosists Otto Sticher and Matthias Hamburger. Psychiatry and neuroscience noticed him too: a brief tribute in Neuropsychobiology carried the title “Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD”. The Economist’s obituary closed with a line widely quoted afterwards and attributed to him there: “Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!”

Two reputations

Hofmann is remembered in two quite different ways. In pharmacology and obstetrics he is the ergot chemist whose partial synthesis of ergometrine and whose methylergometrine became part of the medical response to bleeding after childbirth, and whose hydrogenated ergot alkaloids reached the treatment of circulation problems and migraine. In the wider culture he is the discoverer of LSD and of the active compounds of the Mexican sacred mushrooms. The first reputation rests on decades of quiet laboratory chemistry; the second on a few days in April 1943 and a few years at the end of the 1950s.

What links the two is the method he followed throughout: take a plant, fungus or animal material with a known traditional use, find the single substance responsible, determine its structure, and make it in pure form. That thread runs from the snail enzyme of his doctorate through the sea onion and ergot to the mushrooms and morning-glory seeds of his later work. The discoveries themselves are told on the wing’s other pages, starting from the Albert Hofmann hub.

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Key Research Papers

1. Finney NS, Siegel JS. In Memoriam: Albert Hofmann (1906–2008). Chimia. 2008;62(5):444. DOI: 10.2533/chimia.2008.444
2. Sticher O, Hamburger M. Albert Hofmann (1906 - 2008) - an obituary. Planta Med. 2008;74(8):791-793. PubMed PMID: 18600602
3. Fusar-Poli P, Borgwardt S. Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD (1906-2008). Neuropsychobiology. 2008;58(1):53-54. PubMed PMID: 18799895
4. Hofmann A. How LSD originated. J Psychedelic Drugs. 1979;11(1-2):53-60. PubMed PMID: 392118
5. Hofmann A. Historical view on ergot alkaloids. Pharmacology. 1978;16 Suppl 1:1-11. PubMed PMID: 347462
6. Stoll A, Hofmann A. Partialsynthese des Ergobasins, eines natürlichen Mutterkornalkaloids sowie seines optischen Antipoden. Hoppe-Seyler’s Z Physiol Chem. 1938;251(1-6):155-163. DOI: 10.1515/bchm2.1938.251.1-6.155
7. Hofmann A, Heim R, Brack A, Kobel H. [Psilocybin, a psychotropic substance from the Mexican mushroom Psilicybe mexicana Heim]. Experientia. 1958;14(3):107-109. PubMed PMID: 13537892
8. Hofmann A, Tscherter H. [Isolation of lysergic acid alkaloids from the Mexican drug ololiuqui (Rivea corymbosa (L.) Hall.f.)]. Experientia. 1960;16(9):414. PubMed PMID: 13715089
9. Lee MR. The history of ergot of rye (Claviceps purpurea) III: 1940-80. J R Coll Physicians Edinb. 2010;40(1):77-80. PubMed PMID: 20503690
10. Montagne M. LSD at 50: Albert Hofmann and his discovery. Pharm Hist. 1993;35(2):70-73. PubMed PMID: 11623342

PubMed Topic Searches

1. Hofmann A as author, ergot alkaloids
2. Albert Hofmann obituaries and biographical notes
3. History of the ergot alkaloids
4. History of lysergic acid diethylamide

Further Reading

• Albert Hofmann. LSD — mein Sorgenkind (1979); English edition LSD: My Problem Child (1980), translated by Jonathan Ott.
• Albert Hofmann. Die Mutterkornalkaloide (1964).
• Albert Hofmann. Einsichten und Ausblicke (1986).

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Connections

• Albert Hofmann: Ergot Chemist, LSD and the Sacred Mushrooms
• Albert Hofmann: Ergot Medicines and the Discovery of LSD
• Albert Hofmann: Psilocybin, Psilocin and the Morning Glory Seeds
• Albert Hofmann: Legacy and Later Research
• Pharmacology
• William Withering: Foxglove and the Birth of Digitalis
• Otto Loewi & Henry Dale: Acetylcholine and the Chemistry of Nerve Signals
• Medicinal Mushrooms
• Vitamin B2: History and Discovery
• History of Glucosamine: From Lobster Shells to the Supplement Aisle
• Postpartum Hemorrhage
• Migraine: History and Discovery