Roger Heim was a French mycologist and, as Life put it in 1957, head of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Life reports that he joined a 1956 expedition to Mexico, and it printed his watercolours of the hallucinogenic mushrooms (Life, 1957).
He gave the species its formal names. Kew’s Species Fungorum lists Psilocybe mexicana R. Heim, published in Revue de Mycologie in 1957, with a holotype from Oaxaca (Species Fungorum). A 2026 review says he cultivated it in France and passed material to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz (Tabal-Robles et al., 2026).
He is a co-author of the March 1958 paper that first reported psilocybin (Hofmann et al., 1958) and of the 1959 paper naming psilocybin and psilocin (Hofmann et al., 1959). He is also named as an inventor on the Sandoz patent for obtaining the compounds from fungal material (US patent 3,183,172). According to Hofmann’s 1971 account, Heim found that most of the Mexican sacred mushrooms belonged to the genus Psilocybe (Hofmann, 1971).
Sources
- Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Life, 13 May 1957
- Species Fungorum: Psilocybe mexicana R. Heim
- Hofmann et al., 1958, Experientia 14(3)
- Tabal-Robles et al., 2026
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