Mistakes I Have Made in My Research Career.

I started in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry, London, in October 1972, and spent the next 3 years completing my basic training. I was then offered a research post studying the excretion of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in patients with schizophrenia. DMT is a hallucinogen used by Amazonian Indians in their religious ceremonies, as well as a minor street drug, and the idea was that people with schizophrenia might be walking hallucinogenic factories. At the time, this idea, which appears bizarre in retrospect, was the main neurochemical alternative to the dopamine hypothesis.1 In the course of this project, I managed to offend the then Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute, Denis Hill, by writing an anonymous editorial in which I criticized the state of UK psychiatric research including his department.2 Unfortunately 1 day soon after, when I got on the London underground, there was Professor Hill. He motioned me to sit next to him, and immediately demanded “Murray, do you know anything about this editorial in The Lancet?” I had to admit that I did. He was not pleased—so colleagues suggested I went to the United States for a year, to let him calm down. By the time I came back I was forgiven—he was a kindly man.