Correction to This Article (Washington Post): The April 30 obituary for Albert Hofmann incorrectly reported fatal overdoses from the hallucinogen LSD. There are no known deaths directly attributable to overdoses of LSD, although its mind-altering effects have led some users to misjudge dangers and harm themselves.

Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his "problem child", died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack.

His death was confirmed by Rick Doblin, the Boston-based founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company developing LSD and other psychedelics for prescription medicines.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, thousands of times stronger than mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as psychedelic -- a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with color and movement.

After its discovery, LSD was viewed as a wonder drug with the potential to treat problems including schizophrenia and alcoholism. For the latter, some held the theory that chronic drinkers quit only after experiencing the hallucinations of delirium tremens.

LSD attracted many prominent advocates. They included Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World," and psychologist Timothy Leary, who saw the drug as a potent way for people to live up to his 1960s counterculture motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The CIA was also widely reported to have used LSD in experiments on unwitting subjects. This, and greater recreational use that caused some fatal overdoses, led to the widespread condemnation of the drug and, by the early 1970s, its criminalization. As a result, research permission and funding from state and federal agencies was terminated.

In Dr. Hofmann's opinion, outlawing LSD made its use even more attractive to young people and diminished any safeguards. He spoke of many hippies stopping by his home on the way to their spiritual quest, hoping to score from his "secret stash."

Dr. Hofmann came across LSD while working on medicinal uses of a fungus to act as a circulatory heart-lung stimulant. His first LSD "trip" occurred in 1943, a troubling experience that led him to write in his journal, "A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul." Above all, he wrote, about his second "trip": "I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane."

Dr. Hofmann headed the research department for natural medicines at Sandoz (this firm manufactured LSD under the trade name Delysid by the late 1940s) before retiring in 1971. At the company in the 1950s and 1960s, he discovered and named many of the active hallucinogenic ingredients in Mexican "magic mushrooms," including psilocybin and psilocin. He was credited with important developments in medications for geriatric and gynecological uses as well as drugs to control blood pressure.

He was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee and a fellow of the World Academy of Sciences. He was a prolific writer of scientific articles and the author of several books, many of which tried to bind the scientific with the spiritual. In particular, he denounced the demonization of LSD after hippies and societal dropouts seemed to have monopolized the media's focus.

In his 1989 book "Insight Outlook," he wrote that LSD taken by "mentally stable persons in the right set and setting" was suited to the Western world, which he saw rife with "materialism, estrangement from nature, . . . [and] the missing of a sense-making philosophical fundamentalness of life." Read also this conversation.

His 100th birthday was celebrated in Basel as a referendum on his greatest discovery. He attended the conference, "LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug," and told one reporter that it was his daily diet of a raw egg that kept him spry, not, as many LSD enthusiasts suspected, his long-ago experiments.

His wife of more than 70 years, Anita Hofmann, died in December. One son died years earlier.
Survivors include three children.

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