"In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared."
-- Albert Hofmann

Picture yourself in a boat on the meandering Rhine as it passes through Basel, the most liberal of Swiss cities. Basel is known for its close ties with pharmaceutics and banking, as well as for a long humanistic tradition manifesting itself in a lively cultivation of the arts, sciences, and sports by an enthusiastic population.

Just outside of this lovely medieval city, in one of its the lush green suburbs, lies the home of an elder from a prominent Swiss family, Susi W. [Susi Ramstein]. Born in 1922, Susi had two brothers, a father in optometry, and ancestors who worked in the fields of pharmacy and photography. At age eighty-four, she speaks with a lively, clear, and distinguished voice when she calls me on the telephone, responding to the question that I'd sent her in a letter. I was hoping to find out if she was the one: the first woman to have taken LSD.

"Yes, she says, it's me. I am the Susi you are looking for."

Susi grew up in the inner city, where the houses stand close together and neighborly ties are strong to this day. She was a good student, yet she wasn't sent to college. "Girls were expected to marry early in those days."

But instead at age seventeen--after a year in French Switzerland, where she was taught housekeeping, languages, and manners--the young woman took up her training as a chemical laboratory assistant at the Pharmaceutical-Chemical Research Department of Sandoz Laboratories, in a building that has long ceased to exist. Some sixty years later, Sandoz merged with the chemical companies Ciba and Geigy to become the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, a company that had 73 apprentices in their Chemistry Department in 2011, 43% of whom were women--a percentage that has not varied significantly over the last decade.

In the nineteen forties, however, things were quite different. Young Susi started her three-year apprenticeship with Sandoz Chemical Laboratories as the only female. She was twenty years old when she obtained her license to handle chemicals and began working as a Junior Assistant to Dr. Albert Hofmann, a talented chemist in his late thirties.

By the point when Susi took up her job analyzing samples and concocting mixtures, Dr. Hofmann had already developed LSD-25, an organic derivative of Claviceps purpurea, an ergot fungus that grows on rye. Since animal tests conducted in 1938, the year of its creation, had only revealed that rats under the influence of this new substance grew somewhat restless, Hofmann had shelved it as being of no further interest. Yet in 1943, Hofmann felt drawn to resynthesize the chemical. And after he somehow accidentally absorbed some of LSD while working with it--experiencing an unusual dizziness and dream-like state with kaleidoscopic visions--he decided to conduct an intentional bioassay of the material.

The notion of self-experimentation may seem farfetched to a present day chemist. New drugs, designed to trigger highly precise responses in the body, commonly undergo an approval cycle of ten years or more, involving hundreds of volunteer subjects in various countries and on all continents, in triple-blind studies where neither the subject, nor the researcher, nor the monitoring committee knows which tests were conducted with the chemical being studied or which tests were conducted with placebo. Thus, few researchers would think of trying new drugs on themselves (unless, perhaps, they happened to sufferer from the disease for which they hoped to find an effective medication). However, self-ingestion is an approach with a long and respectable tradition reaching back into antiquity and the foundations of modern medicine.

At points during his first intentional bioassay, Hofmann began to experience a kind of dissociated giddiness, as well as a sense of pleasant expectation that lead up to an experience similar to a few memorable altered states he'd experienced in his youth, when he viewed a particular spot in nature on a hill near his parental home in Baden bristle with light and meaning. The rest is history, with Susi W.'s contribution being a vital footnote.

In Hofmann's well-known book, LSD: My Problem Child, he describes the progression of his experiment conducted on Monday, April 19, 1943. He had believed that the 250 micrograms he'd taken was a tiny dose, which might not have any effects at all. However, he began to feel the drug's effects coming on with unexpected intensity, and he asked his assistant to escort him home. This assistant was Susi, and she had a hard time of it, since Dr. Hofmann was hardly fit to ride his bicycle, and she had to coach him along as well as manage her own mount.

It has been remarked by those concerned about the powerful perception-altering effects of LSD that it was just as well--for his own safety, and for the safety of other drivers or pedestrians out in the street that day--that he had no gasoline for his car. However, Dr. Hofmann didn't actually own a car at the time. He regularly cycled to work, unless he took the streetcar. Under the influence of LSD, the tram did not feel like the best option. Since it was during the height of war, there were no taxis to be found. And civilians couldn't drive their cars anyway, since any gasoline available was restricted to use in army vehicles.

Susi held her boss in high regard and did not want him to go home unaccompanied. Thus she rode along with him on the journey of about five kilometers. Hofmann's wife, Anita, had gone to visit her parents in Lucerne, taking along the two children the couple had at the time. When Susi and Albert arrived at Hofmanns' home, the latter was in a bad way, fearing he was about to die. Susi phoned Hofmann's family doctor--the son of Arthur Stoll, Hofmann's superior--to come to her supervisor's assistance. She also tried to reach Anita Hofmann, who had stepped out but called back later. The doctor couldn't find anything noticeably wrong with his patient, other than his hugely dilated pupils, but he stuck around to continue observing him. Mrs. Hofmann came home at about 7:00 pm seven and took charge. When Susi went home, Dr. Hofmann was feeling a lot better. In fact, he was enjoying himself.

Everybody on Hofmann's team at Sandoz tried LSD at least once, and Susi tried it a total of three times. She took her first trip at age twenty-one, on June 12, 1943. Thus she was not only the first woman but, remarkably, also the youngest person ever to experiment with this powerful substance. Although the dose she took had been lowered to 100 micrograms (a party dose by today's standards), it was nevertheless still a higher dose that either Albert's co-worker Ernst Rothlin or professor Arthur Stoll had tried. The effects she perceived were mild and pleasant, she had beautiful visions, and the world around her took on a luminous quality. It was, in her own words, "a good experience". Having witnessed first-hand her superior's cycling adventure, Susi chose to take the streetcar home from Sandoz. In those days, a conductor went from seat to seat, selling the passengers their tickets. To Susi's altered mind, the conductor seemed to have a rather large nose. Other people on the tram looked funny, too. Susi was young and liked to laugh, but she wasn't confused or destabilized; she had no trouble finding her way home. She repeated the experiment twice to help establish safe dosage parameters for the medical use of LSD. It was determined that a moderate dose of 100 micrograms produced a mild euphoria and an exuberant kind of self-confidence conducive to psychiatric inquiry. Aat that time, the idea that acid would hit the streets and "go mainstream" wasn't even remotely considered.

Set and setting were not buzzwords in those days. What was the programming that Susi's young and open mind underwent prior to her taking LSD? What were her mood and her expectations? The setting of the first part of the experiments was scientific, having taken place at the lab. The time was recorded, and notes were kept. Susi was eager to contribute to the advancement of science and to help determine the usefulness of LSD. As Dr Hofmann says, "LSD finds such an application in medicine, by helping patients in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy to perceive their problems in their true significance."1

His lab assistant had also witnessed Hofmann's reactions to his "overdose", seeing him both in sorrow as well as quite content. Following the traditional wisdom of Paracelsus, the adverse or undesired effects that her boss had experienced had to lie in the dosage. It's just that no one wanted to believe that the chemist had only ingested such a minute quantity and experienced such strong effects. However, LSD's potency was shortly thereafter confirmed by professor Stoll himself. And it also became clear that a reduction of the dose made the effects of LSD more managable. Yet at the time of its federal prohibition in the United States, in 1968, hundreds of psychologists and psychiatrists worldwide had to give up on their promising psychedelic research to follow the paranoid injunction of the Nixon administration: Thou shalt not know! But these events came to pass much later, and they did not affect Susi who--one year after her final experiment--left Sandoz and got married.

Epilogue
I not only received a phone call from Susie W. about this matter. Imagine my surprise early one evening when I picked up the phone and heard the voice of Albert Hofmann, whom I had met and written about on several occasions. "How are you, Mrs. Seiler?" he asked me. (I had always had too much respect and admiration for him to call him Albert, and we had remained on formal terms.) "And how are your children?" he wanted to know next. I was totally blown over that the elderly chemist not only remembered me, but my family as well! We hadn't been in contact for fifteen years. And this, from a hundred-year-old! I felt so happy and privileged that I walked on clouds for days. Dr. Hofmann confirmed what I have written above. And Susi W. passed away shortly before her former boss, in the fall of 2011.