Charles Nichols and LSD gene research

Charles Nichols is hardly a counterculture figure, but he spends lots of time around LSD. And, helped along by his father, he favors giving steady doses of the drug -- made famous during the '60s -- to a bizarre mix of creatures: rats and fruit flies.

And it's all in the pursuit of knowledge and sanity.

An assistant professor of pharmacology at LSU Health Sciences Center, Nichols wants to use evidence gathered in applying hallucinogens to rodents, and then flies, to break new ground in understanding mental disorders in humans. And his work has caught the attention of a key federal grant source.

Nichols has been awarded a $1.4 million grant to isolate novel genes involved in schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis by treating rats and fruit flies with the powerful hallucinogenic LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide.

"I'm the only person combining the flies with rats," Nichols said. "What I'm doing is using new models to look at schizophrenia and look at genes to see what is going wrong. Most models look (only) at rats, so what I'm trying to do is use fruit flies for a more efficient model of a neurochemistry that goes on in the brain."

Nichols' colleague and father, David Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Purdue University, for decades has been studying hallucinogens and serotonin, an organic compound that influences mood changes. He will conduct the first set of experiments in the new study at his lab in Indiana.