Albert Hofmann y el ejercicio

En el sitio lsd.virtuale.org podemos ver una imagen animada de Albert Hofmann haciendo ejercicio (549 K).  No dice la fecha en que fue tomada.

Parece que a Hofmann le gusta ejercitarse porque en hofmann.org se puede leer que su urgencia por ejercitarse lo perjudicó en una operación que después salió bien (2002):

"Report on Dr. Albert Hofmann:  Dr. Hofmann was 96 years old last January 12.  In the last few months he has experienced some serious injuries.  He unfortunately fell and disabled a hip replacement procedure he had done in the past.  A new surgery corrected this.  While he was recovering in the hospital, he was urged to exercise excessively, and the new surgery failed."

http://www.hofmann.org/about/presmsg.html

Hay limites a la reingenieria humana?

Una interesante nota sobre la tecnología y las drogas de perfeccionamiento. Comienza con una descripción de lo ue puede ser un futuro n tan lejano y las implicaciones éticas:

There is no stop button in the race for human re-engineering

Science will soon give some of us the tools to make ourselves cleverer and stronger. What will it mean for our humanity?

Madeleine Bunting
Monday January 30, 2006
ver nota en The Guardian

Fragmentso:

"Five years later, my little grand-daughter is starting school. Again her parents have talked over the pros and cons of cognitive enhancement. A pharmcogenetic package is now routinely offered on the NHS after the government decided that, given international competition in the global knowledge economy, there was no option but to ensure the nation's schoolchildren had better powers of memory and concentration."
...
"What we've been unhappy about is that my daughter has been very tired trying to hold down her job and be a mum, and she's come under a lot of pressure from her boss to get help. What they mean is that she should go on to Provigil. They point out that if she was taking it, she could miss several nights of sleep without any problem. Her colleagues call her a bio-Luddite for refusing."

Hofmann y la hydergina

Seguí buscando referencias sobre Hofmann y la Hydergina y encontré otro que
dice que Hofmann la toma:

Now, Wilson can use his iMac to communicate with the world
outside--including students, fans and colleagues. Among the latter category
are people like Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD as well as a drug
called Hydergine, which Wilson describes as his "current panacea."

"It's a dendrite stimulant," explains Wilson. "Your nervous system has more
dendrites than muscles. I may be walking naturally again someday if it
works as well as some claim. Albert Hoffman is going to have his 100th
birthday in January after 25 years on Hydergine, and everybody says he
looks as healthy as a 60-year-old."

Through the years, Wilson and Hoffman have stayed in touch. "He's a fan of
my books," says Wilson, "and I'm a fan of his drugs."

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/08.10.05/wilson-0532.html

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (born January 18, 1932) is a futurist,
libertarian, and novelist. His best-known work -- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
(1975), co-authored with Robert Shea -- humorously examined American
paranoia about conspiracies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson

El secreto de la longevidad de Albert Hofmann

Revisando drogasinteligentes.com ví que hay una página con fotos del Homenaje a Albert Hoffman (descubridor del LSD y otras drogas) Ateneo de Madrid 11-enero-2006.

En una de las fotos se lee: Gaspar Fraga (derecha) recordó momentos de la vida de Hoffman y sus encuentros con él. Según relató, Hoffman afirma mantenerse tan bien
a sus 100 años gracias a la Hydergina (dihidroergotoxina, creación suya), la única sustancia que ahora toma habitualmente.

Me puse a buscar a ver si encontraba más sobre lo que Hofmann consumía. No pude encontrar nada sobre su uso de la Hydergina (tal vez Juan Carlos pudiera ampliar esto).

Encontré un blog que comentaba e una entrada consicousness is everywhere
a few thoughts about day 1 LSD Symposium sobre lo que fue ese día, donde hubo uso de algunas sustancias.

Pero encontré este post: It's the breakfast, stupid! donde se afirma que Hofmann siempre desayuna con dos huevos crudos batidos y Müesli. La receta del Birchermüesli Original del  Dr. Bircher (hay más detalles en la página):
Ingredients for 4 persons:
4 tablespoons oat flakes
8 tablespoons water
4 tablespoons sweet evaporated milk or cream
Honey or sugar according to your own taste (use as less sugar as possible)
Juice of 2 lemons
8 apples
variations:
You may use plain yogurt instead of water and evaporated milk. You may also add cream, half and half or milk according to your own taste.
Take any kind of berries, oranges or other fruits instead of or in addition to the apples.
You may add 2 to 3 tablespoons grind almonds and or hazelnuts.

Seguí buscando y encontré la noticia en Español:

14 de enero de 2006, 11h39
        
El secreto de longevidad fueron los huevos, no LSD - descubridor

BASILEA, Suiza (Reuters) - El químico suizo de 100 años que descubrió el LSD dijo el viernes que el secreto de su longevidad fueron los huevos que desayuna y no el ácido alucinógeno.

Albert Hofmann, quien celebró su centenario el miércoles, rechazó la idea de que la droga haya prolongado su vida, pese a haber realizado su primer "viaje" a mediados de la década de 1940 y el último hace sólo unos años.

En cambio, Hofmann reveló que el secreto eran los dos huevos crudos que desayuna.

"En un huevo está todo lo que una persona necesita para desarrollarse: vitaminas, minerales y hormonas", dijo el químico.

Hofmann asistió el viernes al primer día de un simposio que se desarrollará durante el fin de semana en Basel, organizado por un grupo sin ánimo de lucro que promueve la investigación de las drogas psicodélicas y quiere abrir un debate sobre si el LSD podría tener un uso clínico otra vez.

Pese a ser conocido como una droga recreativa, el LSD se utilizó en Estados Unidos como un tratamiento psicoterapéutico en la década de los 50 antes de ser prohibido por el gobierno.

Científicos de la Asociación Multidisciplinaria de Estudios Psicodélicos, con sede en Estados Unidos, investigan nuevos usos como los efectos de la droga en fuertes dolores de cabeza similares a las migrañas.

"Aún es mi niño problemático", dijo Hoffman. "Pero con frecuencia se convierten en niños maravillosos. Espero que sea posible con el tiempo que el LSD encuentre en la sociedad el lugar que merece".

En la celebración de su centenario el miércoles, Hofmann añadió su nombre a una petición lanzada por los organizadores del simposio para legalizar la droga con usos clínicos y científicos, que será presentada a las autoridades en Europa y Estados Unidos.*.

¡Para que tengan los obsesionados por el colesterol!. Se ve que Hofmann no le teme a la salmonella. Se supone que los establecimientos productores de huevos están inspecionados y no debería haber problemas, pero ¿un cierto temor da no?, además de si uno tolera el gusto.

Neurogenesis y migracion de las nuevas neuronas

El cerebro produce nuevas neuronas que migran siguiendo el flujo del líquido cefaloraquídeo. Otro nuevo interesante estudio sobre la plasticidad cerebral.

scientificamerican.com


January 13, 2006  


New Neurons Go with the Spinal Fluid Flow


  Recent research has revealed that brains continue to produce new
neurons throughout life, helping create new neural networks. This
neurogenesis only takes place in a few specific areas, such as the area
in which the brain and spinal column meet. The new cells, however, can
migrate throughout the brain and turn up as far away as the olfactory
bulb--a cluster of nerve cells at the front surface of the brain
responsible for the sense of smell. A recent study in mice has revealed
that these neurons make the long and complicated journey by going with
the flow of spinal fluid circulating in the brain.

Importancia del DHA del aceite de pescado

"The synaptic vesicles contain DHA. It is quite possible that depletion in this fatty acid prevents synaptic vesicle synthesis and therefore results in a sharp reduction in neurotransmission. This latter event may precede, and be responsible for, the subsequent over-production of the nerve-toxic amyloid beta protein.

Therefore, insufficient DHA may be a key element in age-associated loss of mental acuity. Supplementing with the omega-3 fatty acids may help attenuate this effect. Another potential method to increase the brain level of DHA is to take an antioxidant, such as vitamin E or alpha lipoic acid, which may help prevent the destruction of this important nutrient."
http://www.juvenon.com/jhj/vol4no04.htm

Ya sabamos que los omega 3 del aceite de pescado son diferentes de los de otras fuentes y no todos convertimos eficazmente los omega 3 en EPA/DHA. Por lo tant arece conveniente incrementaar el consumo de pescado o de suplementos o de huevos enriquecidos.

Entrevista a Albert Hofman en NYT

January 7, 2006
The Saturday Profile
Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders His 'Problem Child'
By CRAIG SMITH

BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann's conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man's oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature," he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. "In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans," he said. "The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature." And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his "problem child," could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls "a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality."

"I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature," he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. "Outside is pure energy and colorless substance," he said. "All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings."

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. "Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom," he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body's circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. "Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child," he said. "I didn't know what caused it, but I knew that it was important."

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. "LSD spoke to me," Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. "He came to me and said, 'You must find me.' He told me, 'Don't give me to the pharmacologist, he won't find anything.' "

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as "bicycle day."

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann's home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. "That was the first planned psychedelic test," Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a "horror trip" when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.

"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," Mr. Hofmann said. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley," who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD "medicine for the soul" and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960's and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others "a crime."

"It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine," he said.

Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.

Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/international/europe/07hoffman.html?adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1136646260-2vvhmKN3gOF3MVzC3pmqqg&pagewanted=print

consumerlab.com analiza productos para mejorar la memoria

El estudio de consumerlab.com de productos para mejorar la memoria encontró que algunos productos estaban contaminados o contenían productos tóxicos en cantidades no aceptables y otros no contenían los principios activos que se publicitaban, aún en marcas muy reconocidas. Otros productos estimulantes a base de cafeína tenían dosis en exceso (hasta 1.223 mg /día).

Para acceder al estudio completo hay que suscribirse. Si alguien dispone de la información nos gutaría saber más.

"ConsumerLab.com tested supplements used to improve memory and cognitive function made with ginkgo, huperzine A, phosphatidylserine, and/or acetyl-L-carnitine.

But CL found significant amounts of lead in supplements made with a form of ginkgo, while those made with another form did not. Several ginkgo supplements were also low in key compounds. And there was no active ingredient in a huperzine A product. Other products successfully passed the testing"

memory enhancers en consumerlabs.com


Comentarios en weblogs:

"Jarrow Gingko Biloba 60mg lacked the active compounds and received a Not Approved.
Life Enhancement' s Huperzine-A contained NO Huperzine-A and (obviously) received a Not Approved.

They reconfirmed our view that the latest research on soy derived phosphatidylserine (PS) shows no efficacy in humans. Previous postive results came from bovine derived PS."


Consumer Lab Testing - What is NOT in your Supplement? (relentless improvement vende productos).

Consumerlab.Com Examines Popular Supplements For Weight Loss, Slimming, and Blood Sugar Control - Finds Numerous Problems reporte de  NPIcenter, el más completo menciona todos los suplementos probados.