"In pursuit of the magic mushroom". Enamelled with sometimes unfortunate experiences, research on the effects of psilocybin has redoubled over the past twenty years.

With the hope of treating a wide spectrum of pathologies of a psychic nature.

Suffering from cancer, Julia Huxley writes a letter to her 14-year-old son, Aldous: “Don't judge too much and love more. She died shortly afterwards, in 1908, at the age of 46.

Aldous will keep the letter with him throughout his life. These farewell words will feed several of his books, including his masterpiece, the anticipatory novel Brave New World (1932).

Aldous Huxley wanted to become a doctor, before failing eyesight made him embrace a career as a writer. It must be said that several members of his family were renowned biologists:

• His grandfather Thomas, nicknamed "Darwin's Bulldog"; his brother Julian, first director of Unesco; or his half-brother Andrew, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1963.
• As for his son Matthew, he worked for a long time at the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States.
• Moreover, here is the other common thread of the Huxley dynasty, struck from generation to generation by serious mental illnesses.
• Noel, another brother of Aldous, did he not kill himself at the age of 25? Thomas, his illustrious grandfather, didn't he suffer from depression?
• It is weighted with this family past that the writer approaches the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, after the Second World War.

Emigrated to California and Canada respectively, the two Englishmen were passionate about hallucinogenic substances – or rather “psychedelics”, a term coined by Osmond in a letter sent to Huxley in 1956.

Mescaline and LSD Get Magic Mushrooms (diethyllysergamide) were the most prominent molecules at the time.

A handful of pioneers
Today, researchers are multiplying studies on the therapeutic effects of these compounds, suggesting that they could treat the anxiety of cancer patients, certain addictions and various eating or cognitive disorders.

But, in the 1950s, there were only a handful of pioneers to carry out such work.