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Introduction

Abstract: Most are familiar with Bicycle Day - when a Swiss chemist accidentally tripped balls cycling home from the lab in 1943 - and Timothy Leary's tiresome "Turn On Tune In Drop Out mantra". But the full history of LSD gets so much more colourful, so much more hilarious, and so much more disturbing. From CIA operatives agreeing to dose each other with "surprise acid trips", hookers hired to spike unwitting San Franciscan civilians, how the founder of AA achieved sobriety through a mind-bending trip, and medieval peasants losing all four limbs to gangrene, the history of acid has it all.

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Speakers

Zoe Cormier, Independent author, journalist, science writer, broadcaster., United Kingdom

Born and raised in the east end of Toronto, in between Chinatown and Indiatown. She holds an Honours B.Sc. in zoology from the University of Toronto, which she received with high distinction in 2005. Thesis: How frogs communicate to each other with low frequency vocalisations. Zoe now lives in Clerkenwell, London. Her journalism has featured in Rolling Stone, The Times, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, BBC Focus and many other publications. She has been shortlisted twice for the Canadian National Magazine Awards: first with a 2005 cover story on vaginal plastic surgery for Shameless, and for a 2006 feature for This Magazine on climate change spin doctoring. She was a columnist, compiling a digest of environmental news and trends for The Globe and Mail – Canada’s largest national newspaper – twice monthly between 2007 and 2009.

Zoe is also a founder of UK science outreach organisation Guerilla Science, a rogue group of science communicators who create events and installations for festivals, museums, galleries, and other cultural clients: a New Scientist profile of Zoe as a “science impresario”. Her book "Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: The Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science" was published by Profile Books in 2014, hand-picked by The Guardian as a “must-read science book”, and ranked as the 7th best book of 2014 by legendary record shop Rough Trade.

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Sponsorship & supporting organisations

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Sponsors

Venue

The Storey

The Auditorium, The Storey, Meeting House Ln, Lancaster, LA1 1TH, United Kingdom

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Committee

• John Hardy Lancaster University, United Kingdom
• Valerie Seymour Lancaster University, United Kingdom
• Sarah Myers STEM Learning, United Kingdom
• Anna Kirkham University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom
• Peter Moorcroft Retired, United Kingdom
• John Hepworth Retired, United Kingdom

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Organised by

John Hardy, Valerie Seymour and Anna Kirkham

Contact information

John Hardy
Lancaster University
Department of Chemistry, John Creed Avenue, Lancaster, LA14YB.
07921405516
Contact us by email

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