#5.
Francis Crick Discovers DNA Thanks to LSD
The Accomplishment:
For the few Cracked readers not versed in the history of human
genetics, Francis Crick is the closest that field gets to a rock star,
which is pretty fucking close as it turns out. In 1953 in Cambridge,
Crick burst through the front door of his home spouting what his wife
Odile originally thought was crazy jibberish about two spirals twisting
in opposite directions from one another. Like all great rock star's
wives, Odile was an artist, and drew exactly what her husband described.
Then the pair and research partner James Watson all went out to a pub
and got drunk.
Above: Science?
Odile had no idea what they were celebrating. "Francis was always
saying things like that." If so she probably should have drawn every
word because those twisty spirals went on to become one of the most
reproduced drawing in the history of science, a first draft of the
double helix structure of DNA that scientists today still describe as
"balls on."
The Drug:
LSD. Yes, when not discovering the key to life, and winning the Nobel
Prize for it, Crick spent the 50s and 60s throwing all night parties
famous for featuring that era's favorite party favors: LSD and nudity.
Crick never made it a secret that he experimented with the drug, and
in 2006, the London paper The Mail on Sunday reported that Crick had told many colleagues that he was experimenting with LSD when he figured out the double helix structure.
Drugs? This guy? No way.
Why It Makes Sense:
The double helix is essentially the Sgt. Peppers of scientific
models, a ladder that's been melted and twirled by a pasta fork, or the
two snakes from the caduceus if one of them was fucking the other with
100 dicks (depending on whether the artist ate the good or bad acid).
Now obviously scientists don't arrive at models by doodling on their
trapper keeper and picking out the shape that looks the coolest. To do
what Crick did required an insane amount of analytical, theoretical, and
spatial thinking. It's not like Crick dropped out of high school and
then used acid to turn himself into a supergenius.
Crick was a fan of
Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, a study of the human mind which was undertaken like all good studies, while driving around LA on mescaline.
Huxley wrote that the sober mind has a series of filters on it that
basically prevent abstract thought (evolution put them there for the
sake of survival, since having daydreams about the nature of the
universe while driving can cause you to plow into a semi). But Huxley
and Crick thought drugs like mescaline and LSD could temporarily remove
those filters.
So rather than melting his mind into a lava lamp of trippy shapes,
Crick probably used LSD to get unfiltered access to a part of his brain
most normal people rarely use.
"It's so fucking beautiful."
Before You Go Trying It...
The long term effects of acid aren't so great. While Crick never
officially rocked a tinfoil hat, he was known to argue that life was
seeded on Earth by a race of prehistoric aliens, a theory that has yet
to gain widespread acceptance among the scientific community, or really
anyone who isn't a character on the
X Files or L Ron Hubbard.
#4.
Freud and Cocaine Invent Psychoanalysis
The Accomplishment:
Freudian psychoanalysis is one of the most influential and
controversial theories of the 20th Century. While you can argue its
merits all day (though we wouldn't recommend it) you can't deny that it
created an entire branch of medicine, and more importantly, gave us the
two best seasons of
The Sopranos.
The Drug:
Cocaine. The first ten years of Sigmund Freud's career were like a
roving cocaine pep rally. He prescribed cocaine to his friends for
headaches, nasal ailments or just to "give (their) cheeks a red color."
After all, why whore yourself up with makeup when you can get the same
effect with a little cocaine?
Actual prescription.
Freud wrote unintentionally hilarious letters to his wife promising
to show her what happens to a woman in the hands of a "wild man with
cocaine in his blood." Oh, and he wrote an entire book called
On Cocaine that's basic thesis was:
Cocaine is fucking awesome. You should really think about trying some.
After one of his friends died from the drug, Freud quietly folded up
his cocaine pom-poms and sweater skirt combo, and went on to found the
theory that was named after him. But a
respected Freud biographer seems to think the drug played a huge role in the less embarrassing, second act of his career.
Why It Makes Sense:
In those letters to his wife bragging that he was a cocaine fueled
sex machine, the man who created the talking cure said he most relied on
the drug to untie his tongue. Louise Breger, who is something called a
professor emeritus of Psychoanalytics Studies at the California
Institute of Technology, suggests that before Freud experimented with
the drug, he was an emotionally sterile, socially awkward guy in a lab
coat. Cocaine not only untied his tongue, it turned him into the chatty
Cathy that wanted to discuss how you felt about your mother.
"I think I'll write about cocaine again."
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's been around people on the drug or at least seen the movie
Boogie Nights.
Cocaine bestows its takers with a preternatural enthusiasm for talking
about themselves, often to the great irritation of the people around
them.
Berger specifically points to a series of all night cocaine benders
in which Freud and his friend Fleischel discussed their "profoundest
despair," as he referred to it. From those sessions Freud came up with
the whole idea of the patient pouring out his feelings on a couch while
the therapist nodded and took notes.
Before You Go Trying It...
Fleischel, the friend who sent Freud on the path toward psychoanalysis was the same guy the drug ended up killing.
#3.
Dock Ellis Trips His Way to a No-Hitter
The Accomplishment:
In the hundreds of thousands of games in MLB history, there have been
only 247 in which the starting pitcher records every out without giving
up a hit. Pedro Martinez, like most pitchers, has gone his entire
career without throwing one. In fact his team, the Mets, who've been
sending a pitcher out to the mound 162 times every season for 46 years,
have never had a pitcher throw one. Dock Ellis became one of the few to
ever do it on June 20, 1970, though he barely remembers it.
The Drug:
Acid. The day of the no-hitter, Dock Ellis woke up around noon on
what he thought was Friday and ate three tabs of acid, presumably
because he was tired of Wheaties. But when his girlfriend arrived she
was carrying Saturday's newspaper, which meant he'd slept through Friday
or that his girlfriend's was a time traveler. The sports page had more
bad news, he was scheduled to pitch in San Diego in six hours. Not only
was the day that was beginning to swim around him the wrong one, the
city his day was swimming in was Los Angeles.
"Not one thing about today makes sense to me."
We probably wouldn't have gone to the ball park that day (not to
mention slept through a Friday and eaten LSD for breakfast). But Ellis
had pitched high before. And by that we mean he had never pitched sober.
Starting with booze as a high school prodigy and moving up through
amphetamines and cocaine in the MLB, his Pirate teammates often took
bets on whether anyone could take as many amphetamines as Dock.
Unfazed despite being on enough acid to melt Jimi Hendrix's guitar,
Ellis hopped a flight to San Diego, and faced down a lineup that had
woken up knowing what day it was, and also had the upper hand in the
"not on acid" category. Not a single one got a hit.
Ellis remembers very little about the game, other than that sometimes
the ball was huge in his hands and sometimes it was tiny, and that at
one point he dove out of the way of a line drive, only to look up and
see that the ball hadn't even reached the mound. If this sounds like a
ridiculous cartoon to you, that's probably what it looked like to Ellis.
So how the fuck did Ellis manage to pitch a better game than Pedro
Martinez ever would?
Why It Makes Sense:
Writing in the New Yorker, Oliver Sacks describes a state of mind
known as "the zone" in which "A baseball ... approaching at close to a
hundred miles per hours ... may seem to be almost immobile in the air,
its very seams strikingly visible... in a suddenly enlarged and spacious
timescape." The zone is typically brought on by confidence, adrenaline
and being fucking awesome at baseball. Ellis was all of those things,
and LSD's affects include increased heart rate and the slowing down of
time. So it's conceivable that Ellis tripped his way into the zone.
What Ellis saw the day of his no-hitter.
A large part of throwing a no hitter is getting over the fact that
you're throwing one. As the game goes on and the lonely bastard in the
middle of the diamond gets closer to immortality, the tension in the
park and in the pitcher builds. Trying to throw a no hitter is such a
mind fuck that it's considered the height of dickery for a teammate to
acknowledge the no-hitter until the final out is recorded.
But baseball history was the last thing on Ellis' mind, keeping his
shit together while a bunch of giant lizards fucked in the on-deck
circle being the first.
Before You Go Trying It...
Ellis had the career trajectory of Darryl Strawberry, never reaching
his potential because of drug addiction. Instead of being a household
name, Dock Ellis is just that guy who threw a no-hitter on acid.
#2.
A Coke Addict Makes a Coke-Flavored Cola and Calls it Coke
The Accomplishment:
The invention of Coca-Cola might not seem to belong on a list next to things like DNA. After all,
way more people drink Coke than have heard of the double helix.
Coca-Cola is simply the most well known brand in the history of the
world. Sure, it's mostly just soda water and sugar. But they sell about
400 billion cans of the stuff a year to about 200 countries, an average
of more than 60 cans to every single human being on the planet.
Pretty impressive for a drink that routinely gets beat in taste tests by Pepsi.
The Drug:
Coke has it right there in the name. When Coca Cola was created in
the summer of 1885, the market was even more crowded with sodas than it
is today. In addition to Coke, Pharmacists were selling thousands of
sodas, including Dr. Pepper, which got its name from the Texas doctor
who marketed it as a cure for impotence. The belief that effervescent
water contained health benefits goes back to the Romans, and given the
state of mainstream medicine in the 1890s, customers were more than
happy to believe Dr. Pepper got your dick up just as well as an old
fashioned leech bleeding. Coca Cola was able to stand out in the crowded
market because it's purported health benefits weren't total and utter
bullshit.
John Pemberton, the Atlanta pharmacist that invented Coca Cola, claimed
that the ingredient it was named after, the Coca leaf, cured everything
from depression and nervousness to morphine addiction. If those
purported effects sound familiar, congratulations, you could beat a
chimpanzee in a game of memory. Coca is the leaf that produces cocaine,
and like Freud, John Pemberton was incredibly enthusiastic about its
"health benefits."
But surely he wouldn't go so far as to stake the claim of his fledgling business on an unproven drug, right?
Why It Makes Sense:
Like Freud, Pemberton practiced what he preached. In fact, when he
said he was convinced from "actual experiments that coca is the very
best substitute for opium addicts," he was speaking from personal
experience, since he was a himself a morphine addict. But whereas Freud
retired his cocaine megaphone once doctors sounded the "shit kills you"
alarm, Pemberton chose to put it in his soda, plug his ears, and hum
loudly.
In his history of the beverage, Mark Pendergrast claims there was
about 8.45 milligrams of cocaine in each serving, which is about 1/4th
of what people put up their nose to get high these days. But fans of the
drink were known to chug up to five at a sitting, or to drink it with
five times the syrup called for in the recipe. When combined with the
sugar and caffeine, that brings the drug to right around street level.
So it's not surprising that by the time cocaine was removed from the
drink in the early 20th century, people were ordering Cokes by asking
for "a dope."
Before You Go Trying It...
If that story makes you think cocaine is cool, you should check out the Russell Crowe smoking commercial
The Insider.
