Welcome to the first installment in the Pearl Institute’s “Psychedelic Biography” series where we honor the pioneers, innovators and risk-takers who have significantly contributed to the human understanding of psychedelics as tools for growth and healing. Psychedelic compounds have been used for millennia and were respected, valued and protected in indigenous cultures and ancient civilizations and were used for healing, divination, celebration, rites-of-passage and other spiritual and social ceremonial functions. However, the history of psychedelics in our modern western culture has been quite different and has been disproportionately influenced by fear, misunderstanding and ignorance. There is an unfortunate ongoing prohibition against legal, safe access to these compounds from our government, pharmaceutical, academic and medical systems even though there is very encouraging evidence that psychedelics could have tremendous value as tools for a deeper understanding of the brain and behavior and as medicines to help address some of our culture’s most difficult social and mental health challenges.
Many of the men and women that we will be exploring in this series are extraordinary individuals who have pursued their work despite the difficulties that come with trying to advance human knowledge that may challenge predominant paradigms and beliefs. The subject of our first biography is David Nichols, an 80-year-old pharmacologist and medicinal chemist from northern Kentucky who has devoted much of his professional life to studying how psychedelics change neurochemistry in the brain and how they may influence behavior. He was one of the first scientists to do extensive, systematic research with MDMA in the early 1980s and he may know more than any human on the planet about LSD and the brain while creating a veritable alphabet soup of psychedelic compounds that is only rivaled perhaps by the late great psychedelic pharmacologist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin. David Nichols is considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the medicinal chemistry of psychedelics and the Pearl Institute is excited and honored to present to you a look at his life and work.
David Earl Nichols was born on December 23, 1944 in the northern Kentucky town of Covington, a town with a population of 63,000, which is located just south of Cincinnati, OH at the confluence of two rivers, the Ohio and the Licking Rivers. A fascination with pyrotechnics as a boy led to an interest in chemistry and he eventually assembled a home laboratory where he could explore further his curiosity about the properties and behavior of matter. After graduating high school, Nichols attended the University of Cincinnati where he earned a bachelors degree in Chemistry in 1969. He then attended the University of Iowa where he became interested in psychedelics and worked extensively with mescaline and earned his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry in 1973 and then continued to do postdoctoral research in Pharmacology at Iowa School of Medicine after graduation until 1974. He went on to teach at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana where he researched medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology for many years and held the position of Robert C and Charlotte P Anderson Distinguished Chair for almost 38 years. Nichols also taught medical students for many years at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has published over 294 scientific articles and 31 book chapters primarily describing the relationship between the structure of a molecule and its effects on the human brain and biology and much of this focuses on psychedelics.
In 1982 he began to study MDMA and its effects and this was before most people even knew about MDMA. A couple of years later when a young man with a vision named Rick Doblin realized that MDMA was in the crosshairs of the DEA and this promising therapeutic aid was about to be made illegal, David Nichols was the chemist he approached to synthesize a large amount of MDMA which Nichols agreed to do pro bono. Interestingly, this batch of MDMA that Nichols made in 1984 was the same MDMA that MAPS used in the FDA-approved Phase 1 studies in the mid-1990s and the Phase 2 studies from 2004-2017 that studied MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for PTSD. Not only was Nichols’ MDMA of exceptional quality but it also proved to be incredibly stable over time. David Nichols was one of the very few pharmacologists in the United States with a license to manufacture Schedule 1 substances and in addition to the MDMA for the MAPS studies, he made the DMT that was used in Rick Strassman’s groundbreaking research in New Mexico as well as the psilocybin used in Roland Griffith’s Johns Hopkins studies.
In 1984, the psychologist Dr. Ralph Metzner had coined the term “empathogen” which means “generating a state of empathy” to try and accurately reflect the effects of MDMA. Nichols was uncomfortable with that term because MDMA and other similar psychopharmacological substances were not really hallucinogenic and did more than just generate empathy and that the “pathogen” part of the term was also the word for disease. In 1986, Nichols coined the term “entactogen” which means “to touch within” and over time, this has become an accepted and widely used term for MDMA.
Throughout his career, Nichols probably did more than any other researcher in the world to help elucidate the effects that psychedelics have on the brain and behavior and he has conducted extensive research on MDMA, psilocybin and mescaline. He has done an enormous amount of research on LSD and contributed more to our understanding of that elusive substance than anyone on the planet with the possible exceptions of Albert Hofmann and Stanislav Grof. In a 2005 article in the Village Voice, Nichols said, “When I was a little kid, I used to play with pyrotechnics. LSD is the closest I could get to a pyrotechnic molecule in the brain.” Nichols has created a plethora of analogues and novel psychedelic compounds in his lab with some of his inventions included in Sasha Shulgin’s revolutionary books “PIHKAL” and “TIHKAL.” Dr. Nichols has stated that in his work he “strives to find positive things” and that he has worked for decades “synthesizing and studying drugs that might improve the human condition and developing medicines to help people.” In addition to his work with psychedelics, Nichols has also extensively researched serotonin receptors and dopamine agonists with the results of some of this work informing promising potential treatments for Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia.
In 1993, David Nichols helped found the Heffter Research Institute which was named after the German research pharmacologist, Arthur Heffter. Heffter was the first scientist to systematically study a naturally occurring hallucinogen and in 1897 he published a paper identifying mescaline as the psychoactive principle in the peyote cactus. The Heffter Research Institute is devoted to helping design, review and fund studies of psilocybin at prominent research institutions in the US and Europe.
“Our research has explored psilocybin for the treatment of cancer-related distress and addiction, for understanding the relationship between the psychedelic experience and spirituality, and for basic science research into the physiology of brain activity, cognition, and behavior. The Heffter Institute believes that psychedelics have great, unexplored potential that requires independently funded scientific research to find their best uses in medical treatment.”
Nichols’ co-founders include some of the heavy hitters in United States psychedelic research history including, George Greer, Charles Grob, Mark Geyer, and Dennis McKenna. Since the founding of the Heffter Institute in 1993, their affiliated researchers account for 63% of the top-cited articles on classic psychedelics.
In June of 2012, Nichols retired from Purdue University after 38 years of service with the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus. The David E. Nichols papers, a collection of his research papers, notes and publications that span his career at Purdue, were donated to the school and are currently housed in the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections.
David Nichols headed south after retirement and is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is affiliated with the Roth lab at UNC where there has been some research with LSD and serotonin receptors conducted and he tunes in each week for their group Zoom meetings where he is affectionately known as “the Wizard.”
Dr David Nichols is featured in the Pearl Institute’s “Psychedelic Biographies” because of his dedication for over 50 years to the research and understanding of psychedelics. His persistence and willingness to study controversial psychedelic compounds at times in our history when there was little to no interest or skepticism and even scorn is one of the reasons we are where we are today in our understanding of psychedelics, the brain and behavior. This video is now live on YouTube.
The Pearl Institute is honored to present as a companion piece to this biography the following interview with the great American pharmacologist and medicinal chemist, Dr. David Nichols. This interview for our Pearl “Spotlight Series” took place at his beautiful home in Chapel Hill, NC on Wednesday, September 4, 2024. Dr. Nichols and his wife Cibele were gracious opening up their home to us and generous with their time. The conversation that took place that afternoon was fascinating and Dr. Nichols shared stories from his life and his work and even some of his own influential psychedelic experiences. We hope that you enjoy the first installment of this interview with one of the true giants in American psychedelic history. This video is now live on YouTube and can be viewed here.
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