Student discovers fungus predicted by Albert Hoffman
wvutoday.wvu.edu
wvutoday.wvu.edu
He is most famous for synthesizing and experiencing the effects of LSD from ergot-derived alkaloids; ergot is a fungal pathogen that grows on grain plants. He then identified psilocybin as the active psychoactive component of magic mushroom samples from Mexico.
When he turned his work to identifying the active component in Morning Glory plants, he presented his work showing that he'd discovered LSA, another ergot alkaloid. Other researchers accused him of having contaminated samples, because he'd found in plants compounds which were known only from the fungi kingdom. Hoffman's work was vindicated, in a sense, when the relationship of endosybiotic fungi (cryptic fungi which spend the majority of their lifecycle inside a plant) was later elucidated.
It also makes me think about how much untapped potential might be hiding in the ordinary plants we pass by every day.
A ton, which is one selfish reason the genetic diversity collapse is such a negative. In this particular discovery, we already knew there was something interesting about the morning glory plant and it took us decades and decades to find it. To give you an idea how little plant life has been studied, we have sequenced the gnome of less than one thousand species.
> “Sequencing a genome is a significant thing,” Panaccione said. “It’s amazing for a student.”
Question - how is it significant, considering they sent it off to another company to do the sequencing?
Then she thought about things incomprehensible for programmers and said the other sentence.
You should stop projecting. I understand something may be incomprehensible to you and you happen to call yourself a programmer. That doesn't mean you're correct about either.
sequencing a genome [of a new species] is a significant thing
I doubt she wrote the grant, professor looks like he would give certain students undue credit.
Sounds awful already
> ... he would give certain students undue credit.
What the fuck???
I hate our stupid ape brains so much.
It's actually a little more complicated than they made it sound. What the student likely did was assemble the genome.
When you send DNA out for sequencing, you get back files of 100-300 basepairs. You then need to do assemble them into a genome by figuring out where all the pieces overlap.
Obviously there are tools that help with this, but there are lots of fiddly bits and settings that you need to play around with to get it right.
Biology is one of those fields where accidental discoveries still have value. Whether they earn the same recognition as some long grinding effort is up in the air, but it's a nice feather in the cap for a student.
There's the old saying: "Chance favors the prepared mind." The student must have had an insight that caused them to investigate something that many other people had probably overlooked or dismissed as unimportant.
Fun fact: I once knew someone whose master’s thesis involved a solid-gas fluidized bed reactor—basically wheat kernels suspended in humid air, with ergot fungus growing on them. Ergotamine was then extracted from the air. The reactor was quite complex, spanning several floors, and was a gift from a now-defunct chemical giant.
Sequencing a new fungus is not that rare. It's done all the time these past years. People discover new species all the time.
What is cool is that they already know a bit about where this fungus lives and what it might do.
The hard biology will be go actually culture it, test it's abilities and see what else it can do.
I mean the article is very short so this is me speculating, but if it is of interest they might figure out what the symbiosis really means to the plant and the fungus.
Also discovering the gene clusters that produce the active compounds will be cool and interesting.
Edit: just so it's clear, its amazing that the student was involved and had the trive to do this. It's easy to not be curious but she was and also she was in an environment where her curiosity was taken serious. That's a great feat of the superiviser or whoever else was involved
yes, such incredible maturity, didn't even mention that these are not the reasons that most LSD is sold, bought, and consumed... although, "self-medication" probably does adhere pretty well.
Yes
To be clear most LSD users, who've done LSD for years, do it for fun.
Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...
Good choice.
It is not fun, unless it is
I don't know about PTSD (although it did help me after I got hit by a truck, and also after I hit my head and nearly died), but it helps me get through stressful times. It also helps me become productive again when I feel like I'm too burnt out to work. I don't know how exactly this happens, but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties.
counterpoint: it might be said that one's "tunnel vision" is made out of anxieties pushed to the background, disrupting the default mode network allows the person to consciously process them. ofc i can't say whether this tracks with your experience
it completely makes sense that a person with neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis might experience these effects differently (different valence to same phenomenon; or, entirely different phenomenon from same preconditions). either way, imo the important thing (confirmed by what you say about the hyper-distractible state which you experience) is for one to spend as much time as needed in the headspace that is appropriate to their neurobiological makeup, rather than that headspace which other people want one to be in as if it's any of their goddam business.
ofc not to be taken that reaching "the personally good headspace" is trivial; a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place! (the premise of neurotypical supremacy?) hence the utility of altered states which demonstrate the opposite and thus provide the introspector with a basis for comparison
thanks for sharing your experiences!
I'm not super sure what "blinders" you're speaking of. I don't think it's expected for a neurotypical person to only be able to keep ~one thought in their head at a time. Although I do notice a lot of the time people find it weird that I remember things that were besides a point; maybe that's what you're talking about.
> neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis
Weird trivia, but it's really fucking weird that dysgraphia predicts an ADHD diagnosis. I seem to have dysgraphia, and lo and behold[0]:
> Individuals with dysgraphia often have difficulties in Executive Functions (e.g., planning and organizing).
What the fuck lmao.
> a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place!
This is a totally different thing; this is intentional rejection of new ideas, and basically rejection of everyone who isn't the same.
> thanks for sharing your experiences!
Of course~
- implicit taboos against things like mental self-modification, metacognition, introspection, empathy (latter two to a lesser degree because of their "glue" function); general abstraction-phobia scaling to sociall anti-intellectualism
- proclivity to pattern-match against acquired linguistic constructs (narratives, ideologies, superstitions) rather than trying to analytically reason about object-level cause-and-effect chains (leads to "shoot the messenger" style symptom-treatments; wireheading scenarios; all the "you can only ever win by being wrong" stuff)
- relatedly, conflating the ethically incorrect, vs the physically impossible, vs the unthinkable (whereas i'd venture there's a definite benefit to being able to tell apart these different modes of putative non-being)
these i view as "architectural patterns" in accordance with which the global "operating system" of "normative being" is constructed; infinite spanners into gearworks coalescing into what from afar might sound as a symphony to someone who has never heard one; poor memory and impaired reasoning skills being either organic side effects - or, scarier still, the very evolutionary pressures that make this whole show viable in the first place
the dysgraphia connection is interesting in its own right; i draw a tentative association with the known educational abuse of forcibly changing people's handedness. where i'm from, this was common up until relatively recently, and it remains folk knowledge that in the long term it can fuck up the developing mind's impulse control and executive function.
i'd conjecture what gets disrupted is the quasi-organic relation to one's "exocortex" (cf. jaynes' hypothesis of the emergence of the ego-as-subject-of-structured-reflection through the invention of writing?) so that one basically gains a self-reinforcing pavlovian "circuit" which fades into the background but disrupts one's cognition and/or motorics every time one approaches the correct conduction of the desired procedure (as in the case of reifying a particular grapheme out of muscle-memory)
sadly, as institutionally legitimized specialists tend to be pre-vetted for strong pro-sociality above all else, mainstream consensus dictates this fascinating and occasionally life-or-death stuff can only be studied on a basis i'd call "the merely actuarial"; but no deeper. conversely, conceptual tools for dealing with directly experienced phenomenological aspects (my "favorite" one being, of course, adversarial impairment of cognition) are few, far between, and rarely if ever from impartial sources.
On the other hand:
"If you get the message, hang up the phone."
- Alan Watts
I spent a long time trying to decide if you were referencing licking the windows, or something more poetic. I decided to let both interpretations occupy my mind, as it seemed greater than the sum of its parts.
- the academic way, where it's studied in labs by "serious people", and after FDA approval a big pharma with worldwide licence sells it for one million $ per kg.
- the black market way, where it's manufactured in quantity by shady RC companies and sold on the internet, until someone tries too large a dose, gets it put in Schedule I and banned.
I guess this one went the first route, unlike LSD.
The black market production started a lot later, mostly due to the War on Drugs.
Wait: I thought LSD is schedule 1, and there are no legally-sanctioned uses of it? Did something change while I was living under a rock? (Unlike MDMA, where there were legally-sanctioned experiments recently.)
Ibuprofen would not survive being compared to the danger of alcohol. A shot-glass full of headache pills can be lethal.
Lots of stuff that's poisonous is legal, though. You can buy and drink all the drain cleaner you want.
> Back at the Kennedy compound before summer's end, away from Billings for the time being, he continued his bad behavior, feeding LSD to his parakeet, and forcing his brother David to trip on the psychedelic mescaline. Hallucinating, looking wide- eyed at his brother, he imagined the worst, screaming, "You're dying just like Daddy!"
Jerry Oppenheimer is generally considered to be a credible biographer and journalist.
That takes care of the charge of "leftist piddle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations." It is not piffle, it is written by a serious reported in a serious biographical piece. It is not a conspiracy theory, for it does not posit any particular conspiracy because typically those require more than one conspirator, and it is about as substantiated as many of the claims RFK Jr himself makes.
Having now established the substance of the claim I made, I shall proceed to establish its relevance. RFK Jr has a long history with drugs, as do many politicians. RFK Jr is the head of the HHS. The secretary of the HHS can initiate proceedings to deschedule drugs. It is hypocritical, given his own admitted history with drugs, to continue to imprison people for it.
For that matter, we have recently had Elon Musk (a notorious drug enthusiast) involved in the highest levels of government while actively doing copious amounts of illegal drugs. He should be in jail, like everyone else of lesser means who have been victimized by this senseless war on drugs. He won't be imprisoned, because he has money. It is the best evidence we have that the war on drugs is actually a war on the poor.
They don't care about drugs, or they'd enforce drug law evenly. Joe Rogan, a self-admitted fan of many schedule 1 hallucinogens, remains a free man in the proto-christian-nationalist state of Texas. It is hypocrisy.
It is time to end this war on drugs and move towards a sensible drug policy that is fair for all people and respects our basic freedoms.
So, yes, it is for HN, thank you.
> That takes care of the charge of "leftist piddle, conspiracy theory, and unsubstantiated allegations."
[Citation Needed]
You're idea of what constitutes a refutation is, and I mean this as nicely as possible, pretty ridiculous.
Do you really, truly, believe this poster to be making a positive claim about when Protestants did or did not exist? If so, I weep for your social comprehension skills.
Christian moralism is an antiquated, self-contradicting, socially regressive belief system that continues to plague humanity and politics to this day. If people want to believe in Sky Daddy on their own time then that's fine, we all need a way to cope our way through the horrors of living with other humans. Your capacity to believe in Sky Daddy ends where it impinges on my freedoms, which are not granted by any imaginary deity. We should keep Yahweh (and every other unfalsifiable, immaterial, intelligence) out of the politics that govern mortal, material, extant humans. An omnipotent presence could surely argue for his own agenda in politics. It's baffling that so many narcissists believe themselves to be charged with the responsibility for advocating his agenda instead.
The fact that you repeatedly write "Sky Daddy" as some child on 4chan seems to also imply that you may not be aware of what kind of a site this is. I don't know. Even the meat of your argument is plainly pathetic and I meant that with no disrespect. The idea that no one can possibly make a credible argument against complete legalization of drugs, which is not to say such an argument would be correct, is sophomoric to the point that I think it may be a topic better left to adults.
It is not passive aggression. It is active aggression. We are seeing the plague of intellectual dishonesty spread in our civilization. It is making things materially worse for people who are currently alive. We should be actively hostile against it. Anybody who's reading this, I encourage you to take up polemics against the Christian faith. Read Peter Boghossian's "A Manual For Creating Atheists."
I have arguments against the complete legalization of drugs. I think there are many valid, good, principled arguments against it. Absolutely nowhere did I raise the idea "that no one can possibly make a credible argument against complete legalization of drugs." Nowhere did I even advocate for the "complete legalization of drugs."
I did not advocate for these things because I do not believe in them as policy positions. I have not, in fact, positively claimed what policies I would like to see enacted. I have criticized the current state of affairs and stated the principles by which I'd like to see them reformed.
You are jumping to conclusions that are not substantively supported by the text you read, probably as a form of prejudice or emotional response to seeing a "reasonable religion" maligned.
I outright reject every moralistic argument from the basis of Yahweh, a deity whose holy book contains self-contradicting inconsistencies, historical inaccuracies, scientific inaccuracies, and moral tragedies. Cry about it. Absolutely no deity which has commanded the sexual assault of innocent women, nor condoned chattel slavery, should ever be considered a source of moral truth. The Yahweh of the old testament is a vindictive, cruel, evil old spirit. The Yahweh of the new testament is, at best, a literary invention of Greek novelists and the charlatan Jesus of Nazareth. Did Jesus say some cool things and have some wisdom? I'd say so. Was he a scholar of the Bible? Probably. Was he the Messiah? Factually, by the messianic prophecies laid out in the old testament, the answer is a resounding "no." Any religion which both claims a text of messianic prophecy and a Messiah which fulfilled zero of those prophecies can not be considered a coherent religion, let alone a reasonable one.
Furthermore, Yahweh is 100% a Sky Daddy. His believers literally call him the holy father. The only way it even makes sense to object to the term "Sky Daddy" is because of the obvious infantilization. However, the infantilization is not my invention; merely my emphasis.
Doesn't this site say you should assume good faith? Maybe you don't know what kind of site it is, "adult."
EDIT: actually, the fact you thought calling Protestants "Bronze Age" was passive instead of active aggression does make me legitimately concerned for your social comprehension skills.
Another thing that makes me worried about your social comprehension skills is that you saw me say "your ability to believe in Sky Daddy ends where it impinges on my freedoms" and immediately jumped to "so you think all drugs should be legal??" I'm pretty sure, at this point, I'm speaking to a dyed-in-the-wool, drank-the-kool-aid, brain-is-fully-rotted theist.
So let me say this really plainly, in easy words, to make sure you can grasp it without ambiguity: you can make arguments against drugs without invoking spirits. You can make moral arguments without invoking spirits.
I do it quite often.
EDIT2: I am fine with people who call themselves Christians. I am not ok with Christian nationalism. I do not want the Christian faith eradicated, but I do want them to stop meddling in politics.
Book: https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/
Documentary based on book: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt21062540/
Also LSA is different from LSD. While you can legally get the former it is (from my experience) way more dangerous than LSD.
This is one of the givens they were working off of. The finding of the research is the fungus that produces the LSA in the seeds.
I took it once in high school. HBWR seeds. Scraped the nasty stuff off the outside. Fell asleep while waiting for it to kick in. Woke up intoxicated. Puked. Went back to sleep
Hell of a plant
That is not necessarily related to the compound but the method of consumption. Natural sources of psychedelic compounds have, naturally, variances in potency. With Morning Glory seeds you also ingest some other probably pharmacologically active compounds, again in amounts that vary from seed to seed.
Very unpredictable, but it was always less, never more intense trips. The fact I took top-of-the-shelf seeds might have to do with that. It's better to take 10 HWBR from Ghana than 50 from Hawaii (may have god mercy upon your soul if this is the case).
Also ipomea vs HBWR is as different as sativa vs indica.
I think it's more common to use synthetic derivatives of ergot alkaloids like ergonovine. But ergot itself is infamously difficult to cultivate. So it's no surprise that they have immediately started trying to culture this new fungus.
LSD can cause PTSD. Dr K of the "Healthy Gamer" YT channel gives that as the reason people shouldn't do LSD in this next 8-min video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So7hE1Ba_QA
The video is not about LSD or PTSD, so it would be nice if I could give a time index into where in the video Dr gives the warning, but sadly I don't have time right now.
If I had listened to stern authority figures telling me that there's never a good reason to try it and it could only do me harm, I would in all likelihood be dead today.
10 years later and this person still isn't right.
This could break even the most healthy person and tells nothing about therapeutic potential of these substances with right approach. Its like judging how healthy salt is to humans by watching some maniac consume 200g of it daily.
For me, I've used LSD a few times, both alone, and with a few trusted people. It's an incredibly intense drug, and if administered correctly, can really help.
Of course it has the potential to really fuck with someone permanently, but so does alcohol, Ozempic, etc, yet we say nothing of those.
Thats an oversimplification to be polite. For most people it can bring the most intense and beautiful experiences their live can ever produce. Then there is (non-trivial) minority which has something broken in their core (which is a statement that can mean many things). Yes, its not for them, or only at great risk (and potentially great reward as OP wrote).
But man, I never ever came close to the simple pure beauty that I experienced repeatedly on mushrooms (for the sake of argument cca 1:1 to LSD), never with any sort of guide, just let my mind wander to places it wants to go.
And I've got married, have 2 beautiful healthy kids, was there to cut umbilical cord for both, climbed extreme peaks like Matterhorn, hiked for weeks and months in himalaya and other places around the world, all very intense.
Psychedelics changed permanently perspective on life and important matters quite a bit. Experienced very intense spiritual moments, despite being cca agnostic (and it just confirmed and enforced my views to be clear). For all the bad it can do and does, it adds so much good to mankind. Its a very powerful tool.
I am not anyhow lowering value of all other things I ever achieved in life, those are some hard won victories that didn't come without pain (and lets check in 20 years whether that stood the test of time). I gave them as a mere comparison.
Those mushrooms were that intense, it would be a lie to say otherwise. Cutting first umbilical cord was second, but then every hard peak I've climbed brought me to my knees and brought tears of joy and released emotions, those were some powerful emotions too (I guess when you struggle very hard and risk life for some specific goal and then reaching it this happens, at least to me).
But don't judge before knowing, there is nothing in this world that can prepare you for that intensity, if dose is enough (milder stuff, full stomach etc may result in different experience). Few words of description - laying in bed with eyes closed, losing gradually all the senses, dissolving what remained into mist of atoms that swirled and danced to shamanic music playing in the background. Then after a long time, very slowly starting to climb down that 'hill' by putting those atoms back together one by one, piecing together my personality, and then sense by sense, very slowly. Pure happiness afterwards, grin for an hour or two. Massive mental exhaustion from 'expanded mind', worst headache I ever had (but basic stuff like paracetamol helped a lot). Long lasting effects on life perspective.
But thats me, other folks may put the umbilical cord as #1, others those mountains or other endeavors.
The ultimate cure for depression: call this new line of sadness and hopelessness and despair as the baseline for what life is. And any ounce of hope, happiness, bloom is a gift and blessing that you appreciate without taking for granted. And then you structure yourself to live for those fleeting moments. And suicide is a world of persistent misery many times worse than what you are experiencing.
But instead you took LSD, and found yourself hope yet the message can be a complete deception. What will you do when you realize that? All you have done is separated yourself from ever understanding your reality because of that hope.
People who suffer from depression are those who are unable to connect with their world. Either trauma, anger, or confusion will cause them separation and difficulty of integration. There is this book called feeling good I think which goes into CBT. The first few pages repeats one thing relentlessly: you have exaggerated the negatives in your world in order to cope with it.
Some people adopt supremacy complexes to give themselves new meaning and curse out all irritations. This is a temporary solution because it swings them into the other side of disconnect eventually
Combined with intensive integration therapy it has been the only treatment that had any positive effect. A lot of treatments have a risk profile in whether they will confirm my existing beliefs and only aggravate my situation (similar to above, failing to find "go to therapy" useful advice and opening myself to blame/unlovability from givers of the advice), but I hope I can go back sometime for a similar treatment if it's psychoactive.
It was no cure, and today I'm largely the person I was before treatment moodwise, but one thing I learned was for a condition such as mine, there is unlikely to ever be a cure. I had just the right amount of trauma that I can expect to manage my condition for the rest of my life. But what opinion do I choose to attach to this belief? That I'm okay with it. It wasn't my fault so there's not any sense in shaming myself for not finding what I can't have. At least one thing I can say is I found something that had an effect, and no matter how pessimistic I get, not even I can deny that with some depressive retort. This is not a sensation I'm familiar with. Before taking the drug I had lost all hope from believing my incompatibility with doctor-approved methods made me an untouchable, on top of already being depressed. It was clear my path forward would have to be paved away from the one society prescribes for me from then on.
Strangely I have no strong desire to take the drug again yet even though I am still depressed. I accept my life will be one of sometimes violent mood swings and I will have to be more patient with myself than in the past. I have made it my life's goal not to foist my malfunctioning brain's irrationality onto others at all costs. My condition is not my fault, but it is my responsibility to manage it. If I'm depressed now I just try to sit with it instead of fighting for things I know are unrealistic to have. I'm just not like most people, and I'm okay with that now, more or less.
One unsolicited idea from a stranger: consider trying it again! I was in a similar situation for a long time (found it helpful but no strong desire to try it again), but multiple trips over time ended up being very helpful - for me at least.
The anti-emetic I needed to take for chemo (chemotherapy is literally poison, your body will quickly figure out that you're being poisoned and, despite the fact that the poison was injected into your veins, throw up to try to remove it, so, you need an anti-emetic or you'll have a bad time each session) has "Nausea, vomiting" on its list of possible side effects. It also has a long list of really nasty psyc effects, so since taking it after chemo isn't mandatory I just didn't, most people take it for a few hours or a day, I just didn't, which was not fun but to my mind the risk wasn't worth it. [Yes I'm fine now, chemotherapy works]
Even more hilariously I read a friend's Morning After pill patient info while she was busy taking it, and almost every symptoms of early pregnancy is on the side effects list - basically the only thing they're not saying you might have despite this pill is a baby. Vomiting, cramps, dizziness and headaches, bleeding, sore nipples - pretty much everything except the newborn human in nine months was on the list.
Wildly irresponsible, many of the fans of these drugs, who seem to talk as if things like risk and responsibility are just constructs from the man trying to keep you down
> I know if I took it again today I would still have a bad time.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe not.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience.
So yes, they did do that.
No.
One in technology should learn to not speak about things in such absolutes, we get proven silly time and time again.
It seems your LSD experience further traumatized you.
I am sorry you had a bad experience.
When someone else tried to explain that to you, you doubled down.
Note that I said: "we get proven silly time and time again". You made that statement a personal attack on you.
It fucking says "we".
This is just a perfect example of what I'm talking about about.
Your trauma has given you a particular worldview that is assigning intent or malice where there is none.
I won't return to this thread, it's not of any relevance and you're clearly worked up about this.
Peace be with you.
Why do you want to convince me to take drugs?
The video seems not to say that nobody should take LSD. In fact it explains how psychedelics can help with depression if I am not totally mistaken.
(LSD is also never actually mentioned in the video. It talks more generally about psychedelics and hallucinogens.)
Here is the passage that I think is relevant to whether people should do hallucinogens. (I was mistaken earlier when I claimed the passage was about LSD specifically.)
>substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it
It is an aside in the middle of another sentence. Here the same passage with more context (specifically, everything said from 7:10 to the end of the video):
>the focus of your mind is on "I". You are the object of your attention. [Dr K looks at the chat stream] OK? Like anxiety, yes. [Dr K stops looking at the chat stream] Then what happens -- so, when this person says, this person on the reddits says, you know, "I actually think that self-awareness is the problem," they are absolutely right because their self-awareness is their default-mode network being highly active. Then we can look at neuroscience papers, and what we discover is that substances like psilocybin fracture our sense of self -- and that can be traumatic and dangerous by the way and leave people with PTSD, which is why I don't recommend you do it -- fractures the sense of self, but when you stu -- when that sense of self gets fractured, you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, and when you are no longer stuck thinking about yourself, this problem of over-self-awareness goes away, and people get better in terms of depression. Does that make sense?
He is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist.
Umm, ok, sure thats what it's used for.
That one sentence just points to a large issue with the whole tone of this article. Clearly LSD is still a problem child.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lsd-9780198840206?la...
Cannabis and LSD have their issues, sure; but, so do so many other drugs that aren’t schedule I.
Scheduled drugs are simply politicized to separate the ‘desirables’ from the ‘un-‘.
source: my family
Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.
Apart from being really stupid advice it was viewed, correctly, as a direct threat to the established order. The established order is very bad (no arguments now?) but Tim and Ken were being very stupid and bought a whole load of shit down and put psychedelics back 40 years
GP's comment isn't suggesting alcoholics are desirable, but that people who preferred alcohol over other drugs were historically part of the "desirable" group. That's my reading of GP's intent, anyway.
there was a lot of racism in US legal history, but don't try to make drugs and white people who wanted to do drugs the victims, it was non-white people who were the victims directly.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lsd-9780198840206?la...
the more insight into the synthesis of a pro-therapeutic substance, the easier (i guess) is to remove the undesirable effects (what recreational people want)