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Gordon Alles

1901–1963 · American · Caltech and UCLA; Alles Chemical Research Laboratories, Pasadena; consultant to Smith, Kline & French 1934-1951

Gordon A. Alles (1901-1963) was an American biochemist and pharmacologist who took all three of his degrees at Caltech and spent most of his career running his own laboratory in Pasadena while holding academic appointments at UC San Francisco, Caltech and UCLA. Looking for a synthetic substitute for ephedrine, he re-prepared amphetamine, which Lazar Edeleanu had already made in 1887 and nobody had tested, and self-administered it on 3 June 1929; he patented the salts in 1932 and licensed them to Smith, Kline & French, which sold them as Benzedrine. He took 126 mg of MDA and wrote the first account of that drug's psychoactive effects, though he did not publish it until 1959. In the 1950s he synthesised and screened further mescaline-like amphetamines, some of it under contract to the US Army's Edgewood Arsenal programme. Royalties from the amphetamine patent made him wealthy; he gave $350,000 to Caltech in 1958.

Compounds credited overall: a pharmacologist rather than a synthetic chemist: four psychoactive compounds are reasonably traceable to him, and only two of those are attributions of first synthesis

Wikipedia

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4 credited across 3 classes · 4 with a page here

  • Amphetamines
  • Amphetamine C9H13N discovered its activity, 1929 source

    Alles did not invent amphetamine: Lazar Edeleanu synthesised it in 1887 and it sat unexamined for forty years. Alles re-prepared it as an ephedrine substitute and had 50 mg injected into himself on 3 June 1929, recording the nasal decongestion, palpitations and 'feeling of well being'. He patented the sulfate and hydrochloride salts (US 1,879,003, filed 2 September 1930, granted 27 September 1932) and assigned the rights to Smith, Kline & French in December 1934; SKF sold them as Benzedrine. Sources put the discovery variously at 1927, 1928 and 1929; the dated self-experiment is the firmest anchor.

  • Methylenedioxyphenethylamines
  • MDA C10H13NO2 discovered its activity, 1930 source

    MDA was first synthesised by Carl Mannich and Willy Jacobsohn in 1910. Alles took 126 mg orally and produced the first description of the drug's psychoactive effects, but did not publish it until 1959, in 'Some Relations Between Chemical Structure and Physiological Action of Mescaline and Related Compounds' in Neuropharmacology: Transactions of the Fourth Conference (Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation). Wikipedia and most secondary accounts date the self-experiment to July 1930; Passie and Benzenhofer (2018), reading Alles's own 1959 text, date it to 1934 and describe the dose as accidental. The event and the 126 mg are well attested; the year is not settled.

  • MMDA C11H15NO3 first synthesis, 1955 source

    Alles made MMDA in his own laboratory in the mid-1950s as one of four methylenedioxy amphetamines he prepared and screened, latterly under contract to US Army medical research; he showed it was markedly less toxic than MDA, MDMA and MDPEA and used cat EEG to rank hallucinogenic potency. Alexander Shulgin synthesised MMDA independently in 1962 and was the first to describe its effects in humans, publishing in Nature in March 1964. The year is approximate ('mid-1950s'); Alles's Edgewood code name for the compound is unknown.

  • Psychedelic Phenethylamines
  • TMA (3,4,5-Trimethoxyamphetamine) C12H19NO3 first synthesis, 1937 source

    Passie and Benzenhofer (2018) state that Alles synthesised TMA around 1937 as a mescaline analogue and compared it with amphetamine in animals and in self-experiments, finding paranoid thought distortion, restlessness and anxiety. He did not publish until 1959, so the compound's first appearance in the literature is Hey's 1947 paper and the first published account of its psychedelic effects is Peretz, Smythies and Gibson (1955). Marked medium because the priority claim rests on a single 2018 historical paper working from Alles's own late account; TMA was also run at Edgewood Arsenal as EA-1319 in 1953-54.

Books

  • On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine 2008 · about them

    By Nicolas Rasmussen. A history of amphetamine rather than a biography, but Alles and his deal with Smith, Kline & French are central to the opening chapters.

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