Background
In the summer of 1960, Timothy Leary was a 39-year-old lecturer at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality and a rising figure in clinical psychology. While vacationing in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Leary was offered psilocybin mushrooms by a local guide. The experience, which he later described as the most profound event of his life, convinced him that psychedelics could revolutionize psychology. He returned to Harvard determined to study psilocybin systematically.
Leary recruited Richard Alpert, a fellow Harvard psychology lecturer, and together they obtained pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin from Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland -- the same company that had first synthesized LSD. The Harvard Psilocybin Project formally began in the fall of 1960, operating under the umbrella of the Center for Research in Personality.
