Arthur Stoll | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 8 January 1887 Schinznach-Dorf, Aargau, Switzerland |
| Died | 13 January 1971 (aged 84) |
| Education | ETH Zurich[citation needed] |
| Awards | Marcel Benoist Prize (1942) Fellow of the Royal Society |
| Scientific career | |
| Workplaces | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München[citation needed] |
Arthur Stoll (8 January 1887 – 13 January 1971) was a Swiss biochemist.
The son of a teacher and school headmaster, he studied chemistry at ETH Zurich, with a PhD in 1911, where he studied with Richard Willstätter. In 1912, he became a research assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, with Richard Willstätter, with whom he explored important insights on the importance of chlorophyll in carbon assimilation.
In 1917, he was appointed professor of chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. In the same year, he was hired as head of the pharmaceutical department of the Sandoz chemical factory in Basel. In this company, he was president from 1949 to 1956, Director from 1964 he held the office of President of the Board.
Together with Sandoz employees, he developed a range of methods for producing drugs. Thus, he developed the first isolation of ergot alkaloids (as ergotamine and ergobasine) and cardiac glycosides, which are used as a medicine for heart diseases and migraines. A continuous process for the production of soluble calcium salts was developed. He worked with Albert Hofmann.
Stoll also collected modern art, including paintings by Ferdinand Hodler.
Arthur Stoll had a son, Werner A. Stoll (1915–1995), a psychiatrist who conducted clinical studies on LSD with Albert Hofmann after Hofmann discovered LSD in 1943.
Hofmann's findings can be traced back to Arthur Stoll. At Sandoz AG Stoll had been working with ergot – a fungus known as a poison and a medicinal substance that mainly affects rye seed heads – since the 1920s. Stoll had derived ergotamine from ergot. [...] Arthur Stoll's son Werner worked as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich – a short distance from the laboratory. Not long after Werner Stoll's initial experiments in the 1940s, LSD started to be widely used as an experimental substance.
Dr. Werner Stoll—the son of Arthur Stoll, president of pharmaceutical company Sandoz, where LSD was first synthesized by Hofmann—became the first to research [LSD] in a psychiatric environment, [...]
The results of the first LSD-25 experiments administered to humans with the aim of investigating its effects on the psyche were published in 1947. Its author, University of Zurich Psychiatry Professor Werner Stoll (1915–1995), was the son of Arthur Stoll, director of Sandoz Laboratories in Basel and where Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938.
In fact, the first truly psychedelic acid trip was recorded by someone else: Werner Stoll, the son of Hofmann's boss. [...] On December 30, he submitted a report on these experiments to Arthur Stoll, which has never been reprinted or translated into English. [...] LSD had begun to circulate among the pharmacists at Sandoz, including Hofmann's director Arthur Stoll, who sought the opinion of his son Werner, a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich. Werner Stoll took 60 micrograms, only a quarter of the dose that had steamrollered Hofmann on Bicycle Day but twice as much as his subsequent experiments. It turned out to be just right. [...] Werner Stoll's report, published in 1947 in a Swiss psychiatry journal, was titled "Lysergic acid diethylamide, a phantasticum from the ergot group."
In 1917 Sandoz created a pharmaceutical department headed by Professor Arthur Stoll (1887–1971) and started a pharmaceutical research group to search for novel drugs. It was this department that the young Albert Hoffman joined following the completion of his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1929. [...] But he was very busy with his project and didn't get round to making it again until 1943. What happened next was detailed in a report he sent to his superior, Prof. Stoll: [...] The original report on the effects of LSD were published by the psychiatrist Werner Stoll—none other than the son of Dr. Arthur Stoll, Albert Hoffmann's superior at Sandoz. [...]
Key Figures: • Albert Hofmann (b. 1906), Swiss research chemist; • Arthur Stoll (1887-1971), Swiss chemist; • Werner Stoll (b. 1915), Swiss psychiatrist
High Times: Why was it four years from your discovery of the psychic effects of LSD [in 1943] until your report was published? [...] Hofmann: [...] After confirmation of the action of this extraordinary compound by volunteers of the Sandoz staff, Professor Arthur Stoll, who was then head of the Sandoz pharmaceutical department, asked me if I would permit his son, Werner A. Stoll—who was starting his career at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich—to submit this new agent to a fundamental psychiatric study on normal volunteers and on psychiatric patients. This investigation took a rather long time, [...] This excellent and comprehensive study was not published until 1947.
