Norman Ohler

This guy was Arthur Stoll.

He later became the CEO of Sandos.

And Arthur Stoll was the first one to crack ergot because this fungus is quite poisonous, actually.

In the Middle Ages, this created ergot.

mass hallucinations in Europe.

Unwittingly, people were eating contaminated bread.

We're having horrific visions.

Actually, limbs fell off because this ergot is a very, very poisonous alkaloid.

But as we know from Paracelsus, the dosage makes the poison.

So if you

That was Stoll's idea.

You take a very poisonous thing, the ergot, and you extract, like you're still able to use the force that's within it as a medicine.

This is how biochemistry, that's basically the foundation of biochemistry.

So Stoll was able to crack the ergot, and the first medicine he made was a migraine medicine, which came out, I think, in 1923 by Sandoz, very successful.

So he immediately hit the jackpot.

He became like the ergot god of the pharmaceutical world.

So he developed more and more medicines with ergot.

One of them, for example, is still used today in childbirth.

It contracts the blood vessels after the birth so you can stop a bleeding.

Otherwise, I guess bleeding would go on much longer in childbirth.