A guess—most compounds are not that toxic, but LSD is potent in very small doses. So that if chemists are routinely exposed to small enough not to kill you doses of whatever they’re working with, when they work with LSD they will notice.
like, chlorine is not that toxic, and a routine step in analysing an unknown compound is to add acid and take a quick sniff to see if chlorine is coming off.
( and one time, the unknown compound we were given to analyse was some benzene derivative, and what you get a sniff of is way, way worse than chlorine).
I am an old person. They may not let you do that in chemistry any more.
I am an old person. They may not let you do that in chemistry any more.
Absolutely! In my first chemistry lab, a long time ago, our teacher warned us that she had just lost a colleague to cancer at the age of forty, and she swore that if we didn’t follow the security protocols very seriously, she would be our fucking nightmare.
The extreme potency of LSD is indeed a critical part of the story; synthesizing it is difficult in part because it’s very hard to produce it in any large quantity without incidentally ingesting active doses through the air. According to Wikipedia, the threshold dose to feel effects is about 25µg. Not milligrams, like the active dose of most medicines, _micro_grams. I am sure chemists over the years have gotten accidental doses of 25µg of many tens of thousands of chemicals without ever noticing it. Albert Hoffman’s original accidental dose was consistent with a ~threshold effect, so it doesn’t seem to be especially serendipitous. He just happened to be the lucky chemist who was working with a chemical which is psychoactive in such trace amounts. (He then intentionally tested a dose of 250µg, which he thought was very small but which is in fact a solid dose.)
Also: Did Albert Hoffman hit the most powerful variant on the first try? No, he was systematically investigating similar compounds for pharmacological properties (not psychedelic properties, just regular drug discovery). LSD is just the one that had significant novel effects at low doses, and so it is the one which became famous.
Oh, that’s a really good point. Actually, it might be common for chemists to work with panels of related molecules, while in clinical trials they only work with one purified drug candidate. This makes it less likely for them to discover things by accident. Surely a piece of the puzzle!
We still smell plenty of things in a university chemistry lab, but I wouldn’t bother with that kind of test for an unknown compound. Just go straight to NMR and mass spec, maybe IR depending on what you guess you are looking for.
As a general rule don’t go sniffing strongly, start with carefully wafting. Or maybe don’t, if you truly have no idea what it is.
A guess—most compounds are not that toxic, but LSD is potent in very small doses. So that if chemists are routinely exposed to small enough not to kill you doses of whatever they’re working with, when they work with LSD they will notice.
like, chlorine is not that toxic, and a routine step in analysing an unknown compound is to add acid and take a quick sniff to see if chlorine is coming off.
( and one time, the unknown compound we were given to analyse was some benzene derivative, and what you get a sniff of is way, way worse than chlorine).
I am an old person. They may not let you do that in chemistry any more.
Absolutely! In my first chemistry lab, a long time ago, our teacher warned us that she had just lost a colleague to cancer at the age of forty, and she swore that if we didn’t follow the security protocols very seriously, she would be our fucking nightmare.
I never heard her swear after that.
The extreme potency of LSD is indeed a critical part of the story; synthesizing it is difficult in part because it’s very hard to produce it in any large quantity without incidentally ingesting active doses through the air. According to Wikipedia, the threshold dose to feel effects is about 25µg. Not milligrams, like the active dose of most medicines, _micro_grams. I am sure chemists over the years have gotten accidental doses of 25µg of many tens of thousands of chemicals without ever noticing it. Albert Hoffman’s original accidental dose was consistent with a ~threshold effect, so it doesn’t seem to be especially serendipitous. He just happened to be the lucky chemist who was working with a chemical which is psychoactive in such trace amounts. (He then intentionally tested a dose of 250µg, which he thought was very small but which is in fact a solid dose.)
Also: Did Albert Hoffman hit the most powerful variant on the first try? No, he was systematically investigating similar compounds for pharmacological properties (not psychedelic properties, just regular drug discovery). LSD is just the one that had significant novel effects at low doses, and so it is the one which became famous.
Oh, that’s a really good point. Actually, it might be common for chemists to work with panels of related molecules, while in clinical trials they only work with one purified drug candidate. This makes it less likely for them to discover things by accident. Surely a piece of the puzzle!
We still smell plenty of things in a university chemistry lab, but I wouldn’t bother with that kind of test for an unknown compound. Just go straight to NMR and mass spec, maybe IR depending on what you guess you are looking for.
As a general rule don’t go sniffing strongly, start with carefully wafting. Or maybe don’t, if you truly have no idea what it is.