Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD
when he discovered the secret of life
By Alun Rees
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 [2004-07-28], 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 Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was 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 in Wales 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 circle 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 £2.5 million — 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 Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrested. 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 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 shape 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."
Monday, October 1, 2007
myspace is not our space
click here
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.
Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.
Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.
(Article continues below)
Try it for yourself, post a bulletin from your MySpace account with a link to Prison Planet contained in the text. Click here and copy the html code into the bulletin window and press send. Then go to "Show Bulletins I've Posted". You will notice that your link has been hijacked and now links to a URL that begins with http://www.msplinks.com - this is MySpace's filtering middleman that was launched earlier this year to supposedly combat spam assaults and phishing scams.
When the link is clicked, it doesn't go to the Prison Planet.com link you intended, but instead forwards to the MySpace home page.
"These links are legit and we are creating them," MySpace.com President Tom Anderson announced in April. "They are not viruses or whatever else your conspiracy theorist friends told you. They still point to their original url, but let us easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites. booyah!"
The problem with this statement is that Prison Planet.com is an alternative news website that has been featured and referenced in hundreds of mainstream publications and is also carried as a news source of Google News. Though our detractors are fond of arguing that we are "not a credible news source," the contention that we are either a spam, phishing or virus website is completely false.
MySpace should come clean and admit that it is now following an official policy of censorship based on political affiliation, and that its readers are not left free to make up their own minds on the credibility of any particular story, but are intentionally prevented from accessing certain websites that MySpace deems contrary to the political agenda of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.
Why is this important? Shouldn't MySpace have the right to block any website they wish? After all, it's their website, they decide the content.
Firstly, websites such as MySpace, Wikipedia and Digg pose as virtuous online information democracies yet are bossed by bias censors and patrolled by organized armies of trolls whose sole purpose is to discredit and delete controversial information by launching unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on the credibility of its source or its very right to be discussed (Wikipedia trolls deleted a list of Republican sex scandals, among a host of other manifestly provable controversies).
They are also wide open to abuse from nefarious government agencies and corporations seeking to "memory hole" sensitive information from the web, as was documented by the WikiScanner scandal. In this climate, a media watchdog like Prison Planet should be welcomed, not shunned, censored and blocked off by MySpace filtering software.
Secondly, this is the model for the imminent arrival of Internet 2, a government regulated and controlled cyberspace police state where bloggers require ID numbers and permission from the powers that be to simply express an opinion, and then that opinion is subsequently subject to censorship and deletion if it is counterproductive to the interests of the state.
Earlier this year, MySpace were caught red-handed when a moderator unwittingly admitted that Prison Planet.com was one of the alternative media websites that MySpace was blocking from its messageboards and bulletin posts.
In a discussion thread, a MySpace user complained that his Ron Paul post had been censored, to which a MySpace moderator responded, "Ron Paul wasn't being censored, it was the prisonplanet.com part of the message that was being filtered out."
The moderator later clarifies that it was beyond his control and that "prisonplanet.com" is on a list of URL's that are automatically blocked by MySpace's servers.
But Prison Planet isn't the only website to be targeted by Murdoch's censorship jackboots - in January 2006 MySpace enacted a policy to block all You Tube links, a move that resulted in a boycott of the social networking website after thousands complained before MySpace was forced to restore the links.
Please use this link to contact MySpace and let them know what you think about their decision to censor political websites that don't toe Murdoch's corporate agenda.
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.
Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.
MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites
Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.
Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.
(Article continues below)
Try it for yourself, post a bulletin from your MySpace account with a link to Prison Planet contained in the text. Click here and copy the html code into the bulletin window and press send. Then go to "Show Bulletins I've Posted". You will notice that your link has been hijacked and now links to a URL that begins with http://www.msplinks.com - this is MySpace's filtering middleman that was launched earlier this year to supposedly combat spam assaults and phishing scams.
When the link is clicked, it doesn't go to the Prison Planet.com link you intended, but instead forwards to the MySpace home page.
"These links are legit and we are creating them," MySpace.com President Tom Anderson announced in April. "They are not viruses or whatever else your conspiracy theorist friends told you. They still point to their original url, but let us easily turn off links to spam, phishing, or virus sites. booyah!"
The problem with this statement is that Prison Planet.com is an alternative news website that has been featured and referenced in hundreds of mainstream publications and is also carried as a news source of Google News. Though our detractors are fond of arguing that we are "not a credible news source," the contention that we are either a spam, phishing or virus website is completely false.
MySpace should come clean and admit that it is now following an official policy of censorship based on political affiliation, and that its readers are not left free to make up their own minds on the credibility of any particular story, but are intentionally prevented from accessing certain websites that MySpace deems contrary to the political agenda of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.
Why is this important? Shouldn't MySpace have the right to block any website they wish? After all, it's their website, they decide the content.
Firstly, websites such as MySpace, Wikipedia and Digg pose as virtuous online information democracies yet are bossed by bias censors and patrolled by organized armies of trolls whose sole purpose is to discredit and delete controversial information by launching unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on the credibility of its source or its very right to be discussed (Wikipedia trolls deleted a list of Republican sex scandals, among a host of other manifestly provable controversies).
They are also wide open to abuse from nefarious government agencies and corporations seeking to "memory hole" sensitive information from the web, as was documented by the WikiScanner scandal. In this climate, a media watchdog like Prison Planet should be welcomed, not shunned, censored and blocked off by MySpace filtering software.
Secondly, this is the model for the imminent arrival of Internet 2, a government regulated and controlled cyberspace police state where bloggers require ID numbers and permission from the powers that be to simply express an opinion, and then that opinion is subsequently subject to censorship and deletion if it is counterproductive to the interests of the state.
Earlier this year, MySpace were caught red-handed when a moderator unwittingly admitted that Prison Planet.com was one of the alternative media websites that MySpace was blocking from its messageboards and bulletin posts.
In a discussion thread, a MySpace user complained that his Ron Paul post had been censored, to which a MySpace moderator responded, "Ron Paul wasn't being censored, it was the prisonplanet.com part of the message that was being filtered out."
The moderator later clarifies that it was beyond his control and that "prisonplanet.com" is on a list of URL's that are automatically blocked by MySpace's servers.
But Prison Planet isn't the only website to be targeted by Murdoch's censorship jackboots - in January 2006 MySpace enacted a policy to block all You Tube links, a move that resulted in a boycott of the social networking website after thousands complained before MySpace was forced to restore the links.
Please use this link to contact MySpace and let them know what you think about their decision to censor political websites that don't toe Murdoch's corporate agenda.
young black male
click here
Edwards: 'Pretty Soon We’re Not Going to Have a Young African-American Male Population in America.'
Asked about what he could do about "inner-city kids partaking in violence" at the MTV/MySpace Forum yesterday, Democratic candidate John Edwards offered an apocalyptic prediction for young black males:
“We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.”
Hyperbole much? Despite popular misperception and those who find it a convenient talking point to illustrate inescapable racism, there are more young African-American men in college than in prison. In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, there were 864,000 black men in college. According to Justice Department statistics, there were 802,000 in federal and state prisons and jails; between the ages of 18 and 24, however, black men in college outnumber those incarcerated by 4 to 1.
UPDATE: Some readers are finding the numbers above confusing. The first set of numbers (comparing 864,000 to 802,000) refers to all black men of all ages. The 4 to 1 ratio is among black men between the ages of 18 to 24. In other words, a large percentage of that 802,000 are black men above the age of 24.
09/28 02:32 PM
Edwards: 'Pretty Soon We’re Not Going to Have a Young African-American Male Population in America.'
Asked about what he could do about "inner-city kids partaking in violence" at the MTV/MySpace Forum yesterday, Democratic candidate John Edwards offered an apocalyptic prediction for young black males:
“We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.”
Hyperbole much? Despite popular misperception and those who find it a convenient talking point to illustrate inescapable racism, there are more young African-American men in college than in prison. In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, there were 864,000 black men in college. According to Justice Department statistics, there were 802,000 in federal and state prisons and jails; between the ages of 18 and 24, however, black men in college outnumber those incarcerated by 4 to 1.
UPDATE: Some readers are finding the numbers above confusing. The first set of numbers (comparing 864,000 to 802,000) refers to all black men of all ages. The 4 to 1 ratio is among black men between the ages of 18 to 24. In other words, a large percentage of that 802,000 are black men above the age of 24.
09/28 02:32 PM
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