Event Details

Zoe Cormier is an author, journalist, science writer, broadcaster and public speaker with an academic training in zoology coupled with an upbringing in the music industry, and will deliver an insightful and entertaining public lecture about the history of LSD.

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.

Bio-sketch: 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.