A Bath of Radiation Fallout

Science Fiction on Acid: the LSD Chromosome Scare

‘The case is not yet proven,’ wrote celebrated sci-fi author Isaac Asimov in 1968, ‘but the indications are that LSD-users are undergoing the equivalent of a private bath of radiation fallout.’ This was, as far as he was concerned, no science fiction, but a potentially terrible fact.

Today we are perhaps more exposed to thinking about radiation and mutations in light of fantastic new abilities, thanks to the mainstreaming of comic book characters. Yet in an age when nuclear war seemed such a likelihood that scary infomercials and drill-practices were part of daily life, a ‘bath of radiation fallout’ had horrific connotations.

Thinking about LSD in this light now is even stranger. Psychedelic lore is replete with poetic comparisons between LSD and the atom bomb, but only so far as the former was so thoroughly tied with countercultural, antiwar symbolism. It was to many people a political antidote: ‘drop acid, not bombs’.

Why then should LSD, famous for its psychological rather than physiological effects, have been so unironically compared to radiation fallout by Asimov? The answer lies in one of the drug’s most hyped scare stories: that it mutated the chromosomes of its users.

With research restrictions in place, and the drug recently scheduled as a controlled substance, LSD’s aura of moral panic was reaching peak intensity in the late-1960s. Then, as if on cue, news from the lab appeared to exceed the moralists’ worst suspicions: its use was literally destroying the very fabric of human life by damaging chromosomes.

Leading the science was Dr Maimon Cohen (1935–2007), a Director of Cytogenetics at the State University of New York, Buffalo. In 1967, he and his colleagues published a paper in Science that described finding chromosomal breaks and rearrangements in leukocyte (white blood cell) cultures to which LSD had been added.

It was powerful fuel for an already brightly burning fire of fear and distrust.

A mini-research boom resulted. Leading the way, Cohen followed up by examining the effects of LSD in vivo and in vitro, and later more shockingly describing chromosomal damage in children exposed to LSD in utero. Mothers high on acid struck at the core of conservative American fear.

According to Cohen and his team:

Since the carrier of such balanced translocations is clinically normal, as are many of his offspring, the consequences of the chromosomal imbalance may not appear for several generations.

LSD was an intergenerational ticking time-bomb. Verification was needed quickly, and a slew of other science papers was published across the world between 1967 and 1972 as the cytogenetic community grappled with this potential future fallout.

News media, however, were less interested in the finitude of debate. Hungry for anti-drug stories, the media fostered a popular consensus affirming this latest scientific ‘discovery’.

News about heritable chromosome damage was especially shocking to wider readers because the thalidomide crisis had occurred only a decade before, and the damaging effects of that drug on children were then so visible. Indeed, it was precisely this type of problem that the new research restrictions on experimental drugs were meant to curb.

Not only this, but it also fed into fears already stoked by the more lurid claims about LSD’s effects on the mind, and of course society as a whole. LSD was by then a very public drug, wrapped up in culture wars. The public were primed for suspicion about its users and their disruptive culture, but now also—as the users were often their grown-up children—the lives of their grandchildren too.

In effect, Cohen’s and others’ observations provided a useful propaganda weapon against the illicit use of drugs. You can for example see Cohen talking about the potential problems he discovered in the anti-drug film LSD: Insight or Insanity? (1968) at 19:54. This, however, is a murky cultural region between science and fiction, where truth is blurred and distorted.

Asimov is a good example of how cultural preconceptions can colour our reading of science, and our communications about it, no matter how careful we are.

The chromosome scare added to the author’s pre-existing feelings against LSD, which he had already voiced in ‘gentleman’s magazine’ Swank (November 1966) when he described taking it as a ‘Russian roulette of the mind’. Now, it was also an ‘agent of harm to individuals other than the user,’ and could ‘multiply the load of human tragedy upon our planet’.

In his second LSD article, which we began with, ‘Counting Chromosomes’, Asimov carefully nailed his own colours to the mast by way of side-stepping the notion that it may be a cultural question determining the course of science.

‘Alas, I am a square’ he began. ‘I don’t use mind-expanding drugs; I have no secret urgings toward psychedelism; I don’t smoke pot…’. He makes plain that, while no hippie himself, he certainly held no specific contempt for them. He was, the reader could rest assured, not only a disinterested (nay, scientific) observer, but also a man of unimpeached (non-drug) clarity.

That sci-fi writers like Asimov should be using the latest science to feed their thoughts and ideas is of no great surprise. Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (June 1968), which was largely aimed at young, college-educated people, he may perhaps have even believed that his science communication was in the service of loftier goals.

Yet was he as objective as he made out?

In truth, the science was in no way settled within the literature. Even in 1967, other researchers—also published in Science—found no abnormalities greater than in control cultures, and a debate ensued around problems in statistical analysis, particularly random sampling errors. In other words, the limitations were as significant as the claims.

Abram Hoffer, who had worked closely with psychedelic pioneer Humphry Osmond, wrote to the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1968: ‘premature claims of toxicity are just as dangerous as premature claims of efficacy.’ And the debate rumbled on for several years, with editorials and studies coming out in both support and criticism in many learned journals.

However, it was clear early on that what seemed like hard-nosed science oddly coincided with the wider LSD panic. Asimov himself reported that Cohen was set on his path in June 1966 ‘after visiting a hippie hangout out of curiosity [and] found himself wondering about the bizarre behaviour of some of them. Were their cellular instructions being interfered with?’

Not only were there scientific concerns from the off, but the data itself appeared to be conforming too neatly to cultural expectations. Perhaps if Asimov had considered Cohen’s anecdote a little longer, his suspicions may have been raised.

To at least one of his science fiction colleagues the situation was quite clearly more political than scientific. The month after ‘Counting Chromosomes’ was published, the same magazine featured a short story by Dean R Koontz titled ‘The Psychedelic Children’. It rightly treated the science of LSD-induced mutations in fiction and provided a societal context all too familiar to the age’s counterculture.

Set in the near future, it describes a world in which the children of LSD users were born with physical or mental mutations, wherein the latter had developed uncontrollable extra-sensory perception. An authoritarian, right-wing government sequestered away those with physical changes, but hunted down and killed those with ESP as especially dangerous.

The story begins with the so-called ‘hallucino-child’, Laurie, being driven by her partner out into a snowy vista, away from anyone. There she is able to release a build-up of her psychic energy without injuring or killing anyone. However, the authorities become alerted, and after questioning, a car chase ensues in which Laurie is shot. When all is seemingly lost, and she lies dying, her ability to control her powers and manipulate reality is released.

An extreme and thinly veiled take on contemporary life, ‘The Psychedelic Children’ took the LSD and chromosome story and neatly wrapped it up in the cultural presumptions of the era. The aberration was not the effect of the drug, but in the very existence of those who had had their minds changed by psychedelics. In this regard, Koontz made plain that the underlying fear was the social change with which LSD was associated.

By the early 1970s, the gallant efforts of several critical scientists finally established a consensus which argued that LSD did not cause any specific physical problems, nor was there any evidence of birth defects. Peer-review mistakes were quickly forgotten, and in Cohen’s obituary, discussion of his work with LSD was carefully avoided.

Uncritical news coverage, however, had done its work, and the myth of LSD and chromosome damage stuck around. The infamous horror film Blue Sunshine (1977), for instance, dealt luridly with the potential aftermath of LSD-driven gene mutation having murderous ramifications. In this way, what began as one scientist’s disgruntled visit to a hippie den helped feed a fear of the drug which persisted for many decades.

Asimov’s last word about LSD is in his memoir, I, Asimov (1994). When he tells people his ideas come through thorough thinking, they are ‘dreadfully disappointed. They would be far readier to believe that I had to use LSD or something like that so that ideas would come to me in an altered state of consciousness. If all one has to do is think, where is the glamor?’

‘To those people’ he said. ‘Try thinking. You’ll find it’s a lot harder than taking LSD.’

Asimov’s earlier warning, however, was more fiction than science, unwittingly and deeply entwined in the perfuse culture of anti-drug messaging and hippie demonization. In the end, a bath of radiation fallout was a more apt metaphor for the way thinking about LSD had mutated rather than the effect of the drug itself.