In search of the perfect high?

Michael reads the news that that alleged drug lab where MIT graduate Kevin McCormick died was actually set up to make more sophisticated drugs than meth and says it all might just be a continuation of a long tradition at Cambridge colleges:

... We remember, thirty years ago, the organic chemistry departments of Harvard and MIT were locked in thier own intercollegiate space race, to design the perfect drug. Every week the lab rats would scurry out of the depths to display their latest designs and discoveries at proto-raves in dorm rooms up and down the banks of the Charles. MMDA was a novelty in those days, along with a veritable alphabet soup of stimulants, halucinogens, morphine analogs, exotic plant extracts and even certain substances reputedly available only from living human donors.

As far as we were able to ascertain, the perfect drug was never isolated. It is interesting to note that the search goes on 30 years later, and that MIT is still at the forefront of these efforts to expand the frontiers of science, just as it is undeniably a tragedy that it has cost the life of a young artist.