At the time of Leary and Alpert’s research at Harvard, neither LSD nor psilocybin were illegal substances in the United States.īy 1962 various faculty members and administrators at Harvard were concerned about the safety of Leary and Alpert’s research subjects, and critiqued the rigor of their unorthodox methodology (in particular, the researchers conducted their investigations when they, too, were under the influence of psilocybin). Psilocybin is an entheogenic hallucinogen which naturally occurs in certain species of mushrooms Leary and Alpert sought to document its effects on human consciousness by administering it to volunteer subjects and recording their real-time descriptions of the experience. Shortly after Leary’s arrival at Harvard, he and Alpert started the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary’s early research focused on the interaction of dimensions of personality and social relationships he also worked as a psychotherapist. in psychology from Berkeley University, and came to lecture at Harvard in 1959. In the early part of his career Alpert conducted personality and social psychology research. in psychology from Stanford University, Richard Alpert came to Harvard in 1953 as an assistant professor. At the time, the possible dangers of researching such substances were not as well known as they were in subsequent decades. Psychology, they argued, has a legitimate interest in how cognition, perception, and emotion are affected by mind-altering substances. They reasoned that psychology is the study of the mind, including its relationship to the brain, body, and environment. In 1960, two promising young psychologists at Harvard, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, began to explore the effects of psychotropic substances on the human mind. One of the stranger claims to fame of the Department of Psychology at Harvard is that it was once home to two of the leading figures in the 1960s counterculture and culture of psychedelic drugs.

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