Mark Plotkin

speaker

534 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Mark Plotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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was studying ergot and ergot alkaloids.

Now, ergot alkaloids are used for difficult childbirth, still used for treatment of migraines.

And he said, okay, let me diddle the molecule.

So you add a side chain, you cleave something off, and all of a sudden you have a new wonder drug or you have deadly poison.

And so LSD, which is one of the new molecules he came up with, was the 25th molecule he created based on the ergot model.

So in technical terms, it's LSD-25, and that's fine.

You know, if you look at the Amazon forest, you've got 30,000 to 80,000 flowering plants in there, depending on whose estimate you accept.

How do you find one that's psychoactive?

Now, imagine the odds if they sent you or me in the Amazon forest and said, find two that'll do this.

because if they're not combined, they don't.

So the point being is that this is just one of the great mysteries.

And who knows?

That's why it's just so endlessly fascinating.

I wrote a book called Medicine Quest, and there's a chapter in there called Plants of the Apes.

And the idea came from my late good friend, Jane Goodall, who was an advisor to the Amazon conservation team.

And I was working on the ethnobotany of wine, the invention of wine, the effect of wine on human culture, Western culture.

And she said we were sitting around drinking scotch, which was her favorite drink.

And she said, I was talking about this, and she said, well, you know, the ancient Greeks and the Romans didn't invent wine.

And I said, yeah, I'm a nerd.

I did my homework.

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