In science, we normally separate the wacko from the considered through the process of peer review in science journals. However, some wacked-out articles do slip through the cracks.

I have always been fond of this paper from the 1962, published in the highly prestigious journal, Science, otherwise known as “Lysergic acid diethylamide: its effects on a male Asiatic elephant” by West, L. J., Pierce, C. M. & Thomas, W. D. (Science 138:1100-1104.)

However, the prosaic title does not betray the, scientifically useless, finding: they killed an elephant in Lincoln Park by injecting it with 297 mg of LSD.

And tonight, whilst reading the memoir An Unquiet Mind, of Professor of Psychiatry Kay Redfield Jamison, I found out something about how that paper came to be. Jamison reminisces that, when she first joined the UCLA department of psychiatry in 1974, she attend a staff party, where she met the then chairman of Psychiatry, who she described as:

... somewhat notorious within psychopharamacology circles for having accidentally killed a rented circus elephant with LSD— a complicated, rather improbable story involving large land mammals in must, temporal lobe glands, the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on violent behavior, and miscalculated volumes and surface areas.

This must have been the same guy who killed the elephant in the Science paper. Putting the bits of info together, with a little help from google, gives Louis Jocelyn West, a popular and well loved psychiatrist who ran the UCLA psychiatry department for many years.

Moral of the story: killing a circus elephant with LSD maybe an accident, but getting that into a Science article, that takes cojones.