Stephen Szára was the Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist who first tested DMT in people. In mid-1950s Budapest, according to his obituary, the Swiss company Sandoz declined to send him LSD, so he turned to DMT; he tested it on himself and then on 30 volunteers, mostly young physician colleagues (Wirz-Justice, 2021). His first paper, in Experientia in 1956, linked DMT’s “psychotic effect” to serotonin metabolism in its title (Szára, 1956).
The molecule was not new. Sources disagree on how Szára obtained it: his obituary says he synthesized it, while a 2018 review says he extracted it from a plant. The same review notes that the Canadian chemist Richard Manske had published a synthesis in 1931, and that nobody had tested DMT in people before Szára (Barker, 2018).
Part of the history is uncomfortable. His group also gave DMT to psychiatric patients, published in 1958 (Böszörményi and Szára, 1958), in a style of “model psychosis” research that would not pass a modern ethics review. Weeks after the 1956 Hungarian uprising he left the country, and he spent the rest of his career in US federal drug research, at NIMH and later NIDA (Wirz-Justice, 2021). He died on 1 August 2021.
Sources
- Wirz-Justice, 2021, Neuropsychopharmacology: In memoriam Stephen I. Szára
- Szára, 1956, Experientia: Dimethyltryptamin, its metabolism in man
- Barker, 2018, Frontiers in Neuroscience: DMT, an endogenous hallucinogen
- Böszörményi and Szára, 1958, Journal of Mental Science: DMT experiments with psychotics
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