4. Albert in Wonderland
One safety rule for scientists is "Don’t eat in the lab." Albert Hofmann’s (1908-) choice to ignore that rule took him not just down a different path but on a whole new kind of trip. In 1938, while trying to develop treatments for migraine headaches, Hofmann made a new chemical, but then had to leave work early due to feelings of "not unpleasant delirium." The next day he thought that there might be a connection between the chemical he inhaled accidentally and his altered mood, so he did the next logical (albeit crazy) thing. He ate some. The chemical was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, and that day Hofmann became the first person ever to "drop acid." LSD has some therapeutic potential, but LSD abuse led Sandoz to stop producing it in 1966.
5. Cell Block
As a little guy, what do you do when your results fly in the face of current dogma? This was Leonard Hayflick’s dilemma. In the 1960s scientists knew that if they put cells in a petri dish with the right nutrients and enough room, the cell culture would stay alive and keep dividing indefinitely. However, Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead had evidence that fibroblast cells in culture would divide only a certain number of times (about 50), and then they would die. To confirm their findings and convince skeptics, these young guns had colleagues working in leading labs, repeating their experiments. Good try, but it didn’t work. Hayflick’s first paper describing the work was rejected because it was contrary to the current line of thinking. Fortunately, the pair persevered and the paper was published in a different scientific journal. The evidence was so compelling that other research listened and the entire field of biogerontology, the study of how cells age, was born.
