Albert Hofmann

Albert Hofmann (1906--2008) was a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz Laboratories in Basel who first synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 and -- five years later, on 16 April 1943 -- accidentally absorbed enough through his fingertips to discover its psychoactive effects. His deliberate self-experiment three days later, on Bicycle Day (19 April 1943), in which he cycled home through Basel during the world's first intentional LSD trip, became foundational to twentieth-century psychedelic culture. He also isolated psilocybin and psilocin from Mexican mushrooms in the late 1950s (Wikipedia)