Simon Howard

“Even in the less-obviously creative fields of hard science, LSD can be profoundly beneficial. In fact, it played a role in the two biggest discoveries in biology of the 20th century. Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson, and Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), had both taken the drug, and attributed some of their understanding and insights to it. Mullis has gone so far as to say: "would I have invented PCR if I hadn't taken LSD? I seriously doubt it ... [having taken LSD] I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.”
― David Nutt, Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs

“I really really don't want to die here, among these criminally ugly furnishings.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“Many [Russian] treatment programmes will only treat [patients] for one health problem at a time, forcing them to choose between being treated for their addiction or for their TB. Since drug users' lives are often chaotic anyway, being unable to receive holistic care means that they often move between different treatment programmes, stopping and starting courses of different sorts of medication - exactly the circumstances that cause viruses to mutate. The result is one of the highest rates of multidrug-resistant TB in the world, a hazard to health that extends beyond the users themselves, affecting Russian society at large.”
― David Nutt, Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs

“The mood music was good as Trump showed his serious side in the closed meeting. A Downing Street source said, "He was on top of any number of quite complex briefs and he'd only been president for a week. That impressed Theresa [May] because she's a details girl.”
― Tim Shipman, Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem