Category Archives: Technological Milestone

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

The 1960s made a complex tapestry: the various civil rights movements, the Vietnam War and it’s divisiveness, pop music’s evolution, environmental awareness, the space and arms races. feminism,  and drugs.

The United States had tried to prohibit beverage alcohol with the 18th Amendment only to need the 21st Amendment remove the prohibition.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

In 1938, chemist Albert Hoffman was working with lysergic acid trying to synthesize a chemical compound that would stimulate the respiratory and circulatory systems.

His 25th synthesis included  diethylamine, a derivative of ammonia. He labeled it LSD-25. His report read in part, “The new substance… aroused no special interest in our pharmacologists and physicians; testing was therefore discontinued.”

Five years later, decided to synthesize LSD-25 again. And on April 16, 1943, while working with the substance, he felt strange and had to go home.

Atlantic Magazine has an excellent article about Hoffman and LSD. Today we’re going to jump ahead a bit to two other men: Nick Sand and Tim Scully.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Nick Sand

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Nicholas Francis Hiskey was born on April 24, 1941. He was a “red diaper baby” as both parents were idealistic Communists during the 1930s. His father was Clarence  Hinskey, a chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII. His mother was Marcia Sand Hinskey.

In 1944, Army counter-intelligence agents observed Clarence Hinskey meeting with a Soviet agent named Arthur Adams. Hinskey was dismissed from the Manhattan Project.

Nick’s parents divorced and his mother took her maiden name and gave it to Nick as his last name as well.

He graduated Erasmus High School (Brooklyn, NY) in 1959. In June 1961, Sand married his childhood friend Maxine “Melly” Lee Solomon. They moved to Israel and worked on a kibbutz.

They returned to the United States and in the fall 1962, Sand started taking classes at Brooklyn College. While there he read about psychedelics and in December 1962 took mescaline sulfate for the first time. He also began using peyote as well as smoking marijuana.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

DMT

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Sand taught himself chemistry and during the summer of 1963 he set up a small lab in the attic of his mother’s house and learned how to make DMT—dimethyltryptamine—an hallucinogen used by injection. He eventually moved the lab to the basement to increase production

In the spring 1964, after chemical fire in basement, Nick moved his lab to a Brooklyn loft and called the business Bell Perfume Labs. He also developed a smokeable DMT.

Also at this time, Sand met Richard Albert (now, Ram Dass). Sand turned on Albert to DMT; Albert invited Sand to Millbrook, a farm in upstate New York, owned by Tommy and Billy Hitchcock, where Timothy Leary, Alpert, Ralph Metzner, and others had established an experimental psychedelic community.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand
Millbrook

Nick took LSD for the first time at Millbrook.

In 1965, a carboy of sulfuric acid in Nick’s lab spilled, dripped downstairs, and ruined fabric in the garment factory’s shop. Nick hastily relocated Bell Perfume Labs to a building filled with dental labs not far from the Brooklyn City Hall.

At the new location he continued to scale up his manufacturing of psychedelics; by this time he was using 72-liter flasks. Nick experimented with making LSD but wasn’t able to figure out how to purify it. His DMT wasn’t very pure at that stage either.

That same year, Nick’s marriage to Melly ended in 1965 because she was unable to convince Nick to give up his obsession with making psychedelics.

In 1966, Sand earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Brooklyn College

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Tim Scully

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

On August 27, 1944, Robert “Tim” Scully was born and grew up grew up in Pleasant Hill near San Francisco.

Scully was a precocious student.  In eighth grade he won honorable mention in the 1958 Bay Area Science Fair for designing and building a small computer. He spent summers working at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on physics problems.

In his junior year of high school, Scully completed a small linear accelerator in the school science lab (he was trying to make gold atoms from mercury)

Scully skipped his senior year of high school and went directly to U.C. Berkeley majoring in mathematical physics. In 1964, after two years at Berkeley, Scully took a leave of absence because his services as an electronic design consultant were in high demand.

Tim Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965. He believed at the time that, “ if everyone shared the experience of oneness, the world might be saved from nuclear destruction, which otherwise seemed likely.”

Scully/Owsley

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

In late 1965, Scully met Stanley “Bear” Owsley. It was a few weeks before the Trips Festival [January 21, 22, & 23, 1966].

Owsley took  Scully as his apprentice and they pursued their mutual interest in electronics and psychedelic synthesis.

July 1966:  Owsley rented a house in Point Richmond, California and Owsley and Melissa Cargill (Owsley’s girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the basement.

Scully worked there as Owsley’s apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% pure. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed “White Lightning”.

Childhood friend Donald R Douglas was Scully’s lab assistant.

Back East

In 1965 Millbrook created the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, whose clergy members, known as Boo Hoos, administered sacraments in the form of psychedelic drugs.

In September 1966, Timothy Leary formed the League for Spiritual Discovery (Advocates the free pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and religious practice by all persons, including those who use entheogenic substances as a Sacrament) as a religion that incorporated psychedelics drugs as sacraments.

Sometime after that he wrote a letter appointing Nick Sand as alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery and instructing law enforcement officials not to impede his work.

Sand began relationship with Jill Henry who was also a part of the Millbrook group.

Nick made a trip to California and  visited Owsley Stanley’s Point Richmond Lab. Owsley suggested to Sand that he should move to California.

LSD illegal

October 6, 1966:  LSD became illegal in California. Owsley and Scully closed CA lab and decided to set up a new lab in Colorado. Scully’s friend Donald Douglas remained in CA to help set up a tableting operation for future supply in Orinda, CA.

December 8, 1966: DEA agent Aiden Hendrix reported that Donald Douglass had purchased bulk amounts of chemicals used for illicit drug making.

By early 1967, Scully had set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo. He and Owsley worked there together, but eventually Owsley returned to CA for tableting of the LSD.

Authorities arrested Owsley on December 21, 1967. Tim Scully moved the lab to a different house in Denver after the arrest.

Owsley will be found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison.

Tim Scully had first met William “Billy” Mellon Hitchcock, grandson of William Larimer Mellon and great-great-grandson of Thomas Mellon, through Owsley in April 1967. Hitchcock loaned Scully $12,000 for the second Denver lab in 1968.

Sand West

February 1967: interested in the synthesizing of LSD, Sand and David Mantell began dismantling Bell Perfume Labs in preparation of moving west. In March, the two began driving across the country so to set up the lab in California.

They failed to stop at a weighing station in Dinosaur, Colorado; and when Nick refused to pay a fine to the arresting officer, both men were jailed.

April 1967: a search of the truck discovered drugs and laboratory equipment. Authorities charged both with federal controlled substance offenses. After many months of legal maneuvering, the charges against them were dropped because the search of their truck was eventually found to have been illegal.

Free on bail, Nick and David finally made their way to California where Bear Owsley asked Tim Scully to teach Nick how to make DOM 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (DOM), a still-legal psychedelic known as “STP” on the street, so that Nick could get back on his feet after his Colorado bust.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand
Jill Henry

Nick traveled back to Millbrook, where he convinced Jill Henry to come to California with him. Initially, they lived on David Mantell’s ranch near Cloverdale, California.

By the end of 1967, Nick and David were using a surplus 200-gallon stainless steel soup kettle as a reaction vessel for making larger batches of STP. They also made smaller batches of DMT and methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA), a psychedelic/empathogen similar to MDMA (Ecstasy).

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Sand Scully

In January of 1968, Nick Sand and Tim Scully searched together for European sources of lysergic acid or ergot alkaloids as raw material for making LSD. Over the next six months they jointly acquired over a kilogram of lysergic acid and a smaller quantity of ergotamine tartrate.

Alice Einhorn, a childhood friend of Sand, helped smuggle the raw materials into the US: UK > Bahamas > Miami > CA.

On June 24, 1968. while in Europe searching for the precursor chemicals, Denver police discovered the second lab. Scully’s assistants were arrested and an arrest warrant for Scully was issued.

Donald Douglas decided at that point to get out of the drug business.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

California again

Still needing the know how, Nick Sand had agreed to finance a new lab for making LSD in return for Tim Scully teaching him the process, As part of their agreement, Tim insisted that any LSD they made would be distributed through The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Nick Sand also agreed to handle the tableting of their product.

In December 1968 Nick Sand  purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California where he and Tim Scully set up a large LSD lab.

Ultimately, this lab produced well over a kilo (more than four million 300 μg doses) of very pure LSD.

Nick Sand tableted this material as small orange pills that eventually became known as Orange Sunshine.  Mike Randell of the Brotherhood claims to have come up w the name Orange Sunshine.

Financial backer Billy Hitchcock asked if he could join the group in California. Scully and Sand approved.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

1969 – 1972

May 26, 1969, authorities arrested Tim Scully in California for the 1968 Denver lab. He decided to get out of the LSD business.

Late May of 1969, Nick closed the Windsor lab but that fall set up the Tekton Development Company in San Francisco to gather and construct  equipment for his next laboratory.

In October 1971, the Narcotics Traffickers Program had selected Nick Sand as a target for investigation by a joint federal narcotics and tax task force.

October 26, 1971 Scully’s Denver case dismissed due to illegal/warrentless entry.

In 1972 Jill Henry left the LSD operations and Sands.

Despite Billy Hitchcock’s urging to get out of the business, in 1972, Nick (using the alias Leland Jordan) and Judy Shaughnessy went on to set up a Signet Research and Development in downtown St. Louis, and a smaller lab in the basement of their rented house in Fenton, Missouri, where they made substantial amounts (millions of doses) of LSD and other psychedelics.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

August 5, 1972, 16 major Brotherhood figures were arrested along with 37 others in coordinated raids in Hawaii, Oregon, and numerous Southern California locations.

Toward the end of 1972, Nick Sand went on vacation. While away, police entered the St Louis house to check about a water leak and discovered the lab.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Trials and appeals

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

In early 1973 federal authorities threatened Billy Hitchcock with 24 years in prison for tax evasion if he didn’t help the government convict the prime movers of the LSD cartel. Billy became an indicted co-conspirator by providing evidence and testifying against Tim Scully and Nick Sand.

In April 1973, Scully and Sand were both indicted. Scully’s defense was that he was producing ALD-52, which was legal, and not the controlled substance LSD-25.

November 5, 1973: trial began and on January 30, 1974, both Sand and Tim Scully were found guilty on multiple charges.

March 8, 1974, Judge Samuel Conti sentenced Sand  to 15 and Scully to 20 years. Nick was eventually sent to McNeil Island penitentiary to begin serving his 15-year sentence. (Conti would also be the judge in the Sarah Jane Moore trial the following year.)

Sand’s girlfriend snuck drugs into the prison and Sand had LSD sessions in his cell. Cellmate Scully did not participate, but worked in library where he read up on bail appeals.

Tim Scully won an appeal for bail reduction and Nick was able to ride on his coattails. Nick was released on appeal bond August 21, 1974.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Scully Back In

Scully’s appeals ran out in late 1976, so he sold his stock in his company and began serving prison time in early 1977.

June 17, 1979:  while still in prison, Scully received a Ph.D. in psychology from the regionally accredited Humanistic Psychology Institute.

The Hour, a Norwalk, CT, newspaper reported that the Washington State Jaycees had chosen Scully as its Outstanding Young Man of the Year based on his development (while still in prison) of a computer device that enabled “a cerebral palsy victim to communicate with the rest of the world.”

Scully had first met the person while free on bail pending his sentencing.

Following the reduction of his sentence to ten years, he was released from prison on parole in August 1979.

Sand on the run

Sand’s St Louis charges were eventually dropped (lack of a search warrant). but on September 11, 1976, Nick got word that his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court was about to be denied.

He chose to become a fugitive and managed to elude federal surveillance with the help of Nancy Pinney [had met her in 1969] as his getaway driver. He threw away his wallet and his old ID as Nick Sand, eventually made his way to Canada, carrying a fishing pole to mislead Canada customs.

He entered Canada under the assumed name Ted Parody — officially Theodore Edward Parody III. He settled in the town of Lumby, in British Columbia, and began growing psilocybin mushrooms as a cash crop.

1981. After spending three years in India, Sands returned to Canada and constructed an LSD lab in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Sand had located a source of ergotamine tartrate in India and made massive amounts of LSD during the years he lived there. He also developed methods to hydroponically grow marijuana.

September 26, 1996, “Ted Parody” was arrested at his lab with 5 kg of DMT, 3.5 kg of MDMA, 5 kg of MDA, 43 grams of LSD and 2.5 kilos of ergotamine tartrate.

By December of 1996, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police realized that the man they’d arrested was Nick Sand, who had been a fugitive for 20 years.

In February of 1998, Nick pled guilty to manufacturing drugs in Canada. He was given a nine-year sentence, which the Canadian authorities agreed to let run concurrently with his US sentence.

Nick’s lawyer eventually made a deal with the American authorities to allow him to be transported to the United States in return for credit for time served in Canada toward his 15-year American sentence.

In February of 1998, Nick pled guilty to manufacturing drugs in Canada. He was given a nine-year sentence, which the Canadian authorities agreed to let run concurrently with his US sentence. Nick’s lawyer eventually made a deal with the American authorities to allow him to be transported to the United States in return for credit for time served in Canada toward his 15-year American sentence.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Sands back in

October 15, 1998: in San Francisco, Sands was tried for bail jumping and found guilty by Judge Conti, the same judge who had presided over the 1974 trial!

January 22, 1999: Conti sentenced Sand to an additional consecutive five-year term.

December 22, 2000:  Nick was released to a halfway house after winning an appeal that overturned his conviction for bail jumping because he was never given a specific date to report to the court.

Nick’s parole was terminated in 2005 and he was able to travel internationally again.

Sunshine Makers Scully Sand

Post Script

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

During 2013 and 2014, Sands and Scully participated in interviews with Cosmo Feilding Mellen; these were used in the 2017 documentary The Sunshine Makers.

Nick was talking about writing a memoir shortly before he died at his home in Lagunitas, California on April 24, 2017.

Owsley Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on March 12, 2011. Owsley’s  family and some of his close friends created The Owsley Stanley Foundation. It was incorporated on August 25, 2011 as a  non-profit dedicated to fostering diverse charitable, artistic, musical, and scientific endeavors for the public benefit.

Since his release from prison, Tim Scully has done many things: lectured in parapsychology at John F Kennedy University, been a research assistant in psychcophysiology  at the University of California, San Francisco, founded Pacific Bionic Systems (reformed in 1980 as Mendocino Microcomputers,  consulted the Esalen Institute and the Children’s Television Workshop on database management and computer games. He has published articles on biofeedback and technical computer topics.

He is now researching a book on the underground history of LSD.

Sunshine Synthesizers Scully Sand

Otto Frederick Rohwedder

Otto Frederick Rohwedder

Happy birthday
July 7, 1880 – November 8, 1960

Otto Frederick Rohwedder

Best thing since…

The expression that something is “the best thing since sliced bread” is one, I guess, that most people younger (other than Boomers) do not recognize.

Even for Boomers, it is an expression that they likely winced at when they heard a parent or grandparent use it.

Until a Boomer, or anyone, tries to actually slice a loaf of bread.

And then other less polite expressions are spoken.

Davenport, Iowa

Otto Frederick Rohwedder was born in Davenport, Iowa. His first profession was a jeweler, but he longed to be an inventor. He sold his jewelry stores to finance that dream.

In 1917 a fire broke out in the factory where he was developing a machine to slice bread. Delayed but not dissuaded, ten years later he successfully developed a machine that both uniformly sliced and wrapped a loaf of bread.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder

Chillicothe Baking Company

The Chillicothe Baking Company was the first to buy his machine and on July 7, 1928 (incidentally his 48th birthday), the company sold its first loaf of sliced bread.

Sales of the machine to other bakeries increased and sliced bread became available across the country.

Toast

Of course, toast was part of American breakfasts already, but with the easy availability of sliced bread, toast became more and more popular and that demand led to an increase in the sale of, what else, toasters.

Wonder Bread

While Wonder Bread may have come to be associated with over-commercialized and less nutritious food, in 1930 the Continental Baking Company introduced its sliced bread.

Other companies followed, eager to find the same success as Continental’s.

By 1933 American bakeries produced more sliced than unsliced bread loaves.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder

Rohwedder died in Concord, Michigan on November 8, 1960. He was buried at Riverside Cemetery in Albion.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

US Labor History

Avondale Mine disaster

September 6, 1869: one of the worst disasters in the history of U.S. anthracite mining occurred at the Avondale Mine, near Scranton, Pa., when a fire originating from a furnace at the bottom of a 237-foot shaft roared up the shaft, killing 110 miners. (see Dec 28)

National textile strike of 1934

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

September 6, 1934: strikebreakers and special deputies opened fire on the 300 textile workers picketing the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina, killing six people and wounding dozens of others; a seventh man died the next day from his wounds. The national textile strike of 1934 saw nearly half a million textile workers from New England, the Mid Atlantic, and the South walk off the job to demand better wages and working conditions. (see Sept 12)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Anarchism in the US

September 6, 1901: Leon Czolgosz, a Polish citizen associated with the Anarchist movement  shot President William McKinley twice in the stomach while McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley had been greeting the public in a receiving line. Czolgosz later confessed to the crime, signing a statement saying that the last public speaker he had heard was Emma Goldman, but added she had never told him to kill the president. (Biography article) (see Sept 10, 1901)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Cultural Milestone

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

September 6, 1916: Clarence Saunders opened the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis, Tenn. [Piggly Wiggly site] (see October 28, 1919)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

BLACK HISTORY

12 Prisoners suffocated

September 6, 1913: twelve Black men held at a prison farm in Richmond, Texas, were placed in an underground cell as punishment for not picking cotton fast enough. Eight of those men died of asphyxiation. The cell was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and seven feet high, and temperatures outside neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The only ventilation in the cell came from four small holes connected to pipes in the ceiling that were “just large enough to admit a quarter.” The next day, inspectors found that one of the holes had been plugged. [EJI story] (next BH, see March 31, 1914)

Emmett Till

September 6, 1955: Emmett Till was buried at Burr Oak Cemetery. The same day, a grand jury in Mississippi indicted Milam and Bryant for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. They both plead innocent. They will be held in jail until the start of the trial.  (see Emmett Till)

Mississippi Southern College

September 6, 1965: after previous failed attempts, Clyde Kennard, Raylawn Young Branch, and Elaine Armstrong became the first African-American students enrolled at Mississippi Southern College (now University of Southern Mississippi). Branch had served as Forrest County NAACP secretary and as an active member of SNCC, CORE and SCLC. [more on Clyde Kennard] (see Sept 8)

Atlanta revolt

September 6, 1966: 4 days of rioting in Atlanta, GA. Authorities blamed without evidence SNCC and its leader Stockley Carmichael. (BH, see Sept 12; RR, see June 2, 1967)

Equal Justice Initiative

September 6, 2010: in September 2010, lawyers at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit civil rights law firm in Montgomery, Alabama, mailed a copy of Slavery by Another Name to client Mark Melvin, then incarcerated at Kilby Correctional Facility. Written by award-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book documents the little known history of convict leasing in Alabama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the book’s title suggests, the exploitative and inhumane convict leasing system strongly resembled slavery. Under the pretext of criminal punishment, African Americans arrested on frivolous charges were sold to plantations, turpentine farms, mining companies, and railroads and forced to work in perilous conditions to pay off “debt” accumulated from unjust court costs and fines.

Deciding that the book’s title was “too provocative,” Kilby prison officials prohibited Mark Melvin from receiving Slavery by Another Name when it arrived in the mail. When Melvin used the internal grievance process to appeal the book’s banning, prison officials defended their decision and insisted the book was properly banned under a rule prohibiting material that incites “violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff.” Alabama prison officials had previously limited prisoners’ access to portrayals of Southern racial history; in the early 2000s, wardens in some Alabama prisons prohibited prisoners from watching a re-broadcast of the Roots miniseries.

In September 2011, represented by EJI lawyers, Mark Melvin sued the Alabama Department of Corrections to be able to read Slavery By Another Name. The civil litigation was settled in February 2013, when state officials finally agreed to allow prisoners to read the book.  [EJI site] (see Nov 15)

BLACK & SHOT

September 6, 2018: Dallas police officer Amber Guyger fatally shot Botham Shem Jean, a neighbor inside his apartment. Police said that Guyger claimed that she mistook his apartment for her own and believed he was an intruder.

After completing her shift, Guyger, still in her uniform, went to her apartment building across the street from the Dallas Police Department’s headquarters, but she  did not go to her own unit and instead tried to enter the residence of Jean.

She then shot him, the authorities said. (B & S and BSJ, see Sept 9)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Women’s Health

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

September 6, 1966: Margaret Sanger, the most famous advocate of birth control in American history, died on this day at age 86. She opened the first birth control clinic in the US, on October 16, 1916, and was arrested for doing so a week later, along with her sister. She rejected a plea bargain and served one month in jail. Sanger’s career as a birth control advocate was filled with many dramatic events in addition to her arrest and jailing. Her magazine, Woman Rebel, was banned from the mails.  After her release from jail in 1917, she produced a short film, Birth Control, which had one private showing on May 16, 1917, after which it was banned. No print is known to survive. She was prevented from speaking on a number of occasions. Sanger’s organization, the American Birth Control League, evolved into today’s Planned Parenthood Federation. (NYT obit) (next WH, see April 6, 1967; Sanger, see July 21, 2020)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

INDEPENDENCE DAY

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

September 6, 1968: Swaziland independent from United Kingdom. [2018 Guardian article on name change] (see IDs for full list of 1960s Independence days)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

September 6 Music et al

Midwest Pop

September 6, 1969: First Annual Midwest Mini-Pop Festival, (Cleveland Zoo) (see Midwest for more))

Jimi Hendrix

September 6, 1970: Hendrix played at the Love and Peace Festival on the Isle of Fehmarn in Germany. He was supposed to play the day before but couldn’t because of bad weather. The festival was not very successful financially and many of the scheduled bands didn’t perform. Hendrix decided to stick around. He had been paid in advance. There were only about 10,000 people that saw him perform. They did not realize that they were watching history being made. It was the last concert Jimi would ever play. (see JH for more)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Technological Milestone

September 6, 1978: US scientists announced the production of human-type insulin by a strain of E. coli bacteria, that had been genetically engineered after months of creative use of gene-splicing techniques. The work was a joint effort by research teams in California at the biochemical firm, Genentech Inc, San Francisco and the City of Hope National Medical Center, Los Angeles. A normal body’s production of insulin takes place within cells of the pancreas, programmed by certain genes (segments of DNA). The scientists synthesized copies of these genes and inserted them into a weakened lab strain of the intestinal microbe Escherichia coli. In 1982, insulin was the first recombinant DNA drug to be marketed, Humulin by Eli Lilly & Co [Gene dot com article] (see July 2, 1979)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Cannabis

September 6, 1988: Administrative law judge Francis Young was asked by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1988 to comment on the merits of rescheduling marijuana in response to NORML’s 1972 petition. Young suggested that marijuana be rescheduled from schedule I to schedule II for nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy. He also concluded that the evidence was insufficient to warrant the use of crude marijuana for glaucoma or pain. (next Cannabis, see December 30, 1989 or see CCC for expanded chronology)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

LGBTQ

September 6, 2005: the California legislature became the first state legislature to pass a freedom to marry bill. The landmark bill was vetoed soon after passage by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Two years later, the legislature again passed a marriage bill, and again, it was vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger.  [Washington Post article] (California, see May 15, 2008; LGBTQ, see Oct 1, 2005)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Terry Jones

September 6, 2010:  an Afghan imam in Kabul convened a demonstration in which protesters burn an effigy of Jones and chant “Death to America.” (see Sept 7)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Stop and Frisk Policy

September 6, 2011: a day after being stopped and detained by the NYPD, City Councilman Jumaane Williams and others urge for reforms to the stop-and-frisk policy. (see Oct 19)

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism

Environmental Issues

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

September 6, 2023: the Biden administration announced that it would prohibit drilling in 13 million acres of pristine wilderness in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska and cancel all drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The new regulations would ensure what the administration called “maximum protections” for nearly half of the petroleum reserve but would not stop the enormous $8 billion Willow oil drilling project in the same vicinity, which President Biden approved this year. [NYT article]

Hottest Summer on Record

September 6, 2023: according to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2023’s June to August was the planet’s warmest such period since records began in 1940,.

The global average temperature for the summer was 16.77 degrees Celsius (62.19 Fahrenheit), according to Copernicus, which was 0.66 degrees Celsius above the 1990 to 2020 average – beating the previous record, set in August 2019, by nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius.

Typically these records, which track the average air temperature across the entire world, were broken by hundredths of a degree. [CNN article] (next EI, see Oct 11 )

September 6 Peace Love Art Activism