Dr. Albert Y. Leung

We need both!   Synthetics have caused countless side effects and new diseases while herbal medicines need intensive efforts to preserve before they disappear in the healthcare world run by ignorant or arrogant scientists educated and trained by Big Pharma, some are greedy.

We have tried to make the former scientific, but we don’t have the means to make it so, in our complex body full of countless  entities like tissues, cells, and cell contents, especially chemicals.  We are still struggling to make them comply with some manmade rules for its cellular (in vitro & in vivo) and small -animal entities.  But after approval of our human clinical-trial step, we still must do exactly as our ancestors had done, subjecting patients to the trial-and-error process.  We have been doing this over the past 8 decades, or more.  Yet we have not learned our lessons. 

The most  obvious and notorious recent ones include Thalidomide in the 1950s/1960s when pregnant patients who consumed it later gave birth to seriously deformed babies (some without arms or legs).  The more recent example within the past decade is Ingrezza (valbenazine)  used in treating tardive dyskinesia that is caused by antipsychotic and gastrointestinal drugs.  This is a typical case that belongs to the synthetic drug-therapy’s vicious cycle (VC).  Just wait for another decade or two and see what  side effects and new diseases Ingrezza will cause.  When it was approved by the FDA in 2017, I was so naïve as to wait for the drug industry to finally recognize the VC as I had described it and start doing something to discontinue (or at least avoid) synthetic drug use.  Instead, this toxic synthetic drug became the star money maker, approved by our FDA.

The discovery of my totally natural Psilocybe baeocystis fungal mycelium for a new safer and less toxic therapy was a serendipity.  It occurred around 2020, over fifty years after my advisor/mentor and I published my graduate research detailing my isolation of the two new psilocybin analogs we named baeocystin and norbaeocystin in 1968.  From 1968 to around 2020, over half-a-century, I did not have anything to do with magic mushrooms.    Regardless, I spent two-and-a-half years doing postdoctoral work with Professor Einar Brochmann-Hanssen in the biosynthesis of opium alkaloids and was co-author in five published papers.  Then, I was employed and fired by two companies for a total of five-and-a-half years before I became an independent consultant for fifty years.

Around 2019–2020, I decided to promote my new book online, My Life & Rollercoaster Career. Published by CreateSpace/Amazon in late 2018, it combines my memoir with eight years of newsletters (1996–2004) in a single volume. The memoir covers my family, education, life in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, and personal challenges such as inattention and possible ADHD. The newsletter reprints my career experiences, first published monthly, then bimonthly, and later quarterly. I eventually stopped because of my consulting schedule, grant work, and travel. In those newsletters, I discussed both synthetic drug therapy and traditional medicine. Although the two are very different, each has strengths as well as limitations. Used together, their strengths and weaknesses can complement one another.

After I returned from retirement to join LinkedIn to promote my book, within weeks I noticed chatters on psilocybin and magic mushrooms.   I rejoined the psychedelic movement and basically forgot about my book promotion. I have then noticed that many businessmen treat their endeavors as if they were ‘goldrush’ adventures.  They also don’t distinguish between natural therapy and synthetic therapy, claiming the former scientific but unaware of the experience and wisdom of the latter.  After working with a few such groups, I decided to form our PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium to produce natural PBN mycelia cooperatively so as not to gouge or exploit others less fortunate.  

It was only then, when reviewing my long-neglected PBN work, that I realized one of the steps in my routine extraction of the Ps. baeocystis mycelia for isolating psilocybin and analogs involved a rinsing step with clean distilled water before drying the mycelial pellets for extraction.  I never paid attention to this step at the time.  But now, that simple step is the key to our commercial totally natural PBN mycelia with no synthetic contaminants like chemicals produced by synthetic, enzymatic, and biotech processes.  That is the principle I use for our organization – PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium.  Together, we can produce totally natural mycelia containing pure PBN!  This technique can be applied to other natural products, especially unregulated herbal supplements where two products from two different companies, with identical herbal ingredients on their labels, can be as different as night and day!  The industry is full of products like these.  Join our Consortium if you want to help us change things. 

Over my 60-year professional career, I have written about drugs and herbs in articles, newsletters, books, and online posts. During graduate school, I worked on liquid cultures of Psilocybe mycelia and isolated two new compounds closely related to both psilocybin and serotonin, which I named baeocystin and norbaeocystin. After that, I was not involved with psychedelic mushrooms for about 53 years. In 2020, when I rejoined LinkedIn to promote my book My Life & Rollercoaster Career (2018, CreateSpace/Amazon), I noticed extensive online discussions about psilocybin and other psychedelics. Within weeks, I had reentered the psychedelic movement.  My book was promptly forgotten. 

Within months, I began to see the movement as a kind of gold rush, led in part by greedy selfish businesspeople who were second- or third-tier leaders but considered themselves technical experts. After I distanced myself from them, they either collapsed or faded from view. I had seen this pattern several times during my long consulting career.  I think my undiagnosed ADHD might have something to do with it because my inattention when dealing with their technical ignorance and arrogance might have shown myself to be dumb to them.  

The fact remains that no one has produced fungal mycelia containing PBN since I first published it in 1968, more than half a century ago. To date, PBN-related materials have been only synthesized or produced through biotechnology or enzyme conversion. All of these methods require extraction and may introduce synthetic impurities. As a result, they remain within the vicious cycle (VC) of drug therapy and do not eliminate the risk of using test materials with the wrong or uncertain identity in research problems that have generated a great deal of unreliable data. As I discussed in the five key issues in my June 9, 2026, post, which few of my scientific colleagues have addressed, more published studies based on uncertain or incorrect test materials are likely to continue. Examples include treating caffeine as coffee, curcumin as turmeric, or citing the notorious “ginseng abuse syndrome” paper as though it accurately represented ginseng, along with many other cases of misidentified herbs.

We can’t continue to let the VC and a handful of narcissistic gazillionaires holding the world’s wealth hence the power, dictate the direction of our health and fate.  With my approach, at least starting with totally naturals (fungal mycelia containing natural PBN), we can start to bypass the VC that has controlled our research focus and health for so many decades!  More on our PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium in my next post.  So, stay tuned!

My June 10, 2026, post – based on item #5 in my last post (June 9, 2026) – clearly shows that our synthetic drug therapy has a lot lacking. 

I have observed this for a long time and have been pointing it out, but no colleagues seemed to dare openly agree with me for various reasons.

Since the science in our drug therapy is based on an active synthetic chemical that is brand new to our plant and most likely inherently toxic because it is produced from toxic petroleum.  Our complex multichemical body has never been in contact with it since our human species appeared o earth eons ago.  Some chemicals among the millions or billions within our body are bound to reject this new stranger.  Hence, the toxic side-effects and/or new diseases with our new synthetic drugs.   If the therapeutic entity is a natural chemical or herb containing many chemicals, like the chemicals in our body, they all have had prior contact and interactions with one another.  Hence, no vicious cycle will be created.  Unless someone decided to try petroleum on his headache or aching joints using the trial-and-error process our ancient ancestors had used.  See how long he would survive to tell his story.

Nevertheless, active-chemical-based drug therapy has its weak points.  It is only scientific maybe up to its human clinical-trial step.  After its approval for patient use, it is the trial-and-error process our ancestors had used for developing our traditional medicines.  However, the synthetic drug’s toxic nature may not show up for months, years, or decades.  And the time element in modern drug therapy is lacking!

Therefore, the deficiencies of modern active-chemical(s)-based therapy using synthetic drugs and those of traditional medicines can be used complementarily.  We can then take advantage of their good points along with their deficiencies.  We just have to mind the pluses of each but be always aware of their un-miscible elements.   I know how to start to restore our rapidly declining health by bypassing the vicious cycle caused by using synthetic drugs in therapy and way too many additives in our foods and drinks.  We can start this by targeting natural psychedelics, first using  totally natural Psilocybe mycelia containing PBN.  Some of the issues that I raised in at least the #5 item in my last post should no longer be major problems when dealing with synthetic chemicals.

1. Compared to traditional medicines used by us for thousands of years, synthetics have only 150 years of human use history – a tiny fraction.  However, being made from toxic petroleum, they are inherently toxic and the scientific tests (in vitro, in vivo, in small animals, etc.) are meant to see how toxic they are before subjecting them to clinical trials in humans;
2. Petrochemicals are not the same as plant and animal substances our ancestors tested over countless generations to learn what was edible or medicinal. Many of them people died during that process. Yet some argue that because petroleum is natural, chemicals derived from it are therefore not toxic. I am not aware of any ancestral tradition based on people safely consuming petroleum and passing down that experience.
3. Few, if any, of us have also addressed the issue of purity of synthetic drugs.  World pharmacopoeias usually list up to a few %.  But even 1% of an impurity in synthetics can spell serious trouble if that chemical is particularly strong-acting or highly toxic.  For example, if 1% of LSD is added to psilocybin, a normal dose of the latter containing the LSD would make its psychedelic effects double because LSD is up to 200x stronger acting than psilocybin.  Regardless, how many studies of synthetic psilocybin over the past 25 years had unknown strong-acting or toxic impurities therein without the researchers’ knowledge?  These would  have obviously distorted our research data.  How much of our research literature over the past several decades was based on unsure test objects (drugs), meaning useless resulting data?    Plenty! Because I have encountered this quite often myself. 
4. Antibiotics (penicillin), steroids (testosterone & cortisone), and opioids (morphine, heroin & fentanyl) are some of the most useful and then abused drugs we have.  The fields have turned from a few life savers to increasingly more new drugs being abused along with new diseases that require more new drugs to treat, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle (VC).   And treating drug abuse is itself a booming industry!  
5. No one mentions that our modern drug-therapy process with synthetics is not scientific.  Its initial testing on in vitro and in vivo cell systems is scientific, so may be in animals with limited life span (whose results cannot be directly translated to humans).  Then, when clinical trials are done on humans for increasingly shorter time before approval, we still have to go through the trial-and-error process in patients – the same process used by our ancient ancestors thousands of years ago.  So, our modern drug development and testing process is not complete (lacking science and/or human wisdom) without using the trial-and-error step along with its essential time element – millennia, not just a generation or two.

Psilocybin(P)     Norbaeocystin(N)    Baeocystin(B)    Aeruginascin(A)     Serotonin(S)  

2 methyls         no methyl   4-OH          1 methyl              3 methyls            no methyl  5-OH 

Although this post specifically lists the closest analogs simultaneously to psilocybin and serotonin, the vicious cycle (VC) applies to them as well.  The PBN Naturals mycelia, especially the B therein when dephosphorylated in the brain becomes an unidentical twin of serotonin.  Will it help serotonin perform its brain functions when needed among others in the rest of our body?  Thus, norbaeocystin with its phosphate removed becomes 4-hydroxytryptamine  that is practically a twin of 5-hydroxytryptamine (also called serotonin). 

In my last post of June 2, 2026, I again stressed the vicious cycle (VC) when using synthetic chemicals.  Unlike herbal medicines, they are brand new to our planet and all have inherently toxic effects because they have no long-term contact or interactions with humans.  The longest for synthetics is 150 years while for natural medicines it is countless years or, say, 150 millennia!   Nothing has been done with this twin since it was ‘born’ 60 years ago!

Despite our recent forebears’ invention of scientific tests to try synthetic drugs first on cells and animals, eventually clinical trials in humans, we still must go through the same trial-and-error process our ancient ancestors used in developing our traditional medicines.   Am I that wrong with my scientific thinking or is it that our system of healthcare is entrenched by greed?   Regardless, our modern drug-therapy process using synthetics which includes trial and error of traditional medicines is obviously NOT scientific; it is faux science.   But sensibly combining the two would resolve our current VC problems, especially if our country abandoned its failed capitalistic system to be more like the socio-political system of Canada or Scandinavia whose governments handle their people’s healthcare.  

Hence, in the USA, the VC is owned by drug and insurance companies.  They have all the incentives to keep it private and ongoing in perpetuity, as it has already been doing for several decades.  Which is why we have so many ill people and the world’s highest drug costs.   For years we have not been ranked among the world’s 30 or 40 healthiest nations, despite we are the richest and most scientifically advanced, both now debatable.   

Since rejoining the psilocybin movement six years ago, I have published many online posts, mostly on my work in psychedelics:   PBN = Psilocybin Baeocystin Norbaeocystin

However, from late 1967 to early 2020 when I rejoined the psychedelic space, I had not participated in any activities involving magic mushrooms for over fifty years.  But during the past six years, I have been trying to start a PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium.   It is to afford completely natural fungal mycelial products at reasonable prices to fellow humans who suffer the illnesses and side effects caused by synthetic drugs.   Our Consortium will be for minimal profits because a nonprofit has too many restrictions for me to handle by myself.

After I completed my teaching assistantship, my advisor and mentor, Dr. Ara G. Paul, assigned me the Psilocybe project and secured a four-year Lilly Foundation fellowship for me. This allowed me to devote nearly all my time to research. I then spent more than a year analyzing tryptamines and indoles related to psilocybin and psilocin using thin-layer chromatography (TLC). Today, high-performance TLC (HPTLC) is more common in America, but the basic operating principle is the same. A key feature of both TLC and HPTLC is the Rf value, which measures how far compounds in a mixture travel across the adsorbent on a plate as solvents carry them upward by capillary action. Among the 36 tryptamines and indoles I studied, psilocybin had the lowest Rf value in numerous solvent systems.  After I had begun analyzing extracts of Psilocybe species, I noticed Ps. baeocystis extracts consistently showed a smudgy unclean psilocybin band.   So, I did 2-demensional runs on them.  Which showed more than three extra spots next to psilocybin.  That has led me to the discovery of two new psilocybin analogs, that I named baeocystin (B) and norbaeocystin (B).  I suspect another analog is aeruginascin but I didn’t pursue it because it would have taken me another 6 months to finish my PhD.

B and N are the closest analogs simultaneously to psilocybin and serotonin.   Since 4- hydroxytryptamine (dephosphorylated N) is the un-identical twin of 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin), an important hormone and neurotransmitter present throughout our body, why has no one studied any of them, especially the twin?   I suspect one or both of the following two issues play a role:

1. The vicious cycle (VC) is a common element caused by synthetic drug therapy which I have been describing for years.  It is a goldmine for drug makers and their interdependent associates.  While they perpetually get filthy rich the rest of humanity get poorer and sicker.

I doubt I would have discovered the psilocybin analogs if I had not used the simple TLC for my analyses.    Just consider the fact that it has been almost 60 years since  I got my PhD from Michigan and published my work, no one has succeeded in growing Ps. baeocystis or any other psychedelic mushroom and produced mycelia that contained natural psilocybin and/or analog(s).     Considering I am never interested in making money by exploiting or restricting others, I’ve found it unusual to see so many ‘goldrush’ entrepreneurs after I rejoined the psychedelic movement only about six years ago.   One  particular group was first a non-profit organization getting free advice from well-known experts, but then went for-profit by themselves and got most of the moneyed investors.  They are all sticking to synthetic psychedelics and seem unaware of the VC.  If allowed to continue, Americans will continue to suffer from the toxic side effects and new disease inherent in the VC.   The only way to resolve this situation is to bypass the VC.  That is exactly what our Consortium plans to do.

When I was still actively traveling, 15 or even 20 years ago, I used to comment on the ‘third-world’ status of our airports compared to the ones from which I left European, Asian, and other foreign cities to fly home.   I have not done this for close to 10 years now.  Regardless, from my world travels to different locations, I have seen modern high-speed trains  and magnificent bridges, especially in China that we used to consider backward and some of us still do.  Thus, compared to our own country over the past few decades, we have had few visible advances.  Instead, we have plenty of homeless people in major cities, many of whom are veterans.  Maybe the funds for correcting some of these disgraceful happenings have disappeared quietly into the pockets of a few,  especially those of the ones who were cowards and had avoided serving America in our armed forces.

The root cause of our country’s decline in health and health science is our failure to clearly define the science we use in our therapy of illnesses using synthetic drugs.   Since these drugs are made from toxic petroleum, they are brand new to our planet, never been tested, and thus are inherently toxic.   Our recent forebears at least had the foresight of subjecting them to in vitro, in vivo, in small animals, up to human clinical trials until they are proven safe and effective.  Then, they are  declared ‘scientifically’ ready for patient use, and the trial-and-error process used by our ancestors begins anew.  However, unlike the traditional medicines our ancient ancestors had developed eons ago with their accumulated experience and wisdom, synthetic drugs have no more than a few generations of experience.  So, we are stuck with modern medicines that are not scientific nor consistent, and have no experience with humans.

For more than 3 generations now, no one seems to have paid attention to our use of synthetic drugs in therapy.  My smart science colleagues all seem to be interested in their own pursuits, digging deeper and deeper holes without surfacing above ground to view the scenery (i.e., acquiring specializations without ever considering their relevance to our health and environment).  So now, we have all these specializations with their own complicated jargons, what do we do with them?  Just make a living for ourselves, and to hell with our health being perpetually ruined by synthetic drugs with their side effects and more new diseases caused by them, which require more new drugs to treat, leading to the vicious cycle (VC).  This VC is our demise – it supports different industries in helping to treat our illnesses.   Yet most patients helped by this drug therapy are sickened by the new drugs in the VC.  Do you see any end to this?  I understand it would be very difficult for my colleagues to understand this dilemma.  But we can’t simply let this VC remain.   We need to deal with its root cause that lies in its toxic ingredients generated in the synthetic process from fossil fuels.  The synthetic chemicals are brand new and contain also impurities that are brand new and most likely also toxic.  How much attention have we paid to them?  Or do we assume and hope they are not that toxic, 1% or 2% would not be too much  or harmful?  Regardless, their toxic effects may not show up immediately, or in a day or even months.   Haven’t you noticed the general poor health of our fellow Americans in the past 30 to 40 years most of whom routinely take drugs (OTC or prescription) and/or ingest junk foods and colored and sweetened drinks, all loaded with synthetic additives?

All our specializations may look impressive, perhaps making you tons of money.   But they don’t improve our health.  The only way to avoid or bypass specializations based on the VC of using toxic synthetic chemicals is not to use them whenever possible.    That is something I have special insight and plan to do. 

I spent 3 years at graduate school analyzing tryptamines/indoles related to psilocybin and psilocin using HPTLC, followed by growing psychedelic mushrooms in liquid culture.  I isolated 2 psilocybin analogs from Psilocybe baeocystis and named them baeocystin and norbaeocystin.  They are the closest sister compounds simultaneously to psilocybin and serotonin.  I am not sure if I used other analytical techniques would have led me to discover such close analogs.  When dephosphorylated, norbaeocystin becomes 4-hydroxytryptamine; it is a non-identical twin of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine).  The latter is an important hormone and neurotransmitter responsible for various important brain and body functions.   Yet 60 years after I published the papers on them, no scientists have repeated my work.   No one knows what serotonin’s twin, 4-hydroxytryptamine, can do.   I have written about this issue over the past decades.  Yet most scientists (or most likely the ‘businessmen faux scientists in charge’ of their outfits) are too blinded by greed or ignorance to notice anything unusual when they work on these psychedelic tryptamines.  And for 60 years!?  Why are we wasting our research money on token research or research using the wrong science or wrong approach that I call faux science?

Talking about faux science used in especially psychedelics research, I am bringing up the vicious cycle (VC) again.  I have a feeling the current goldrush companies are run by businessmen who think they are also technical, thus wasting our money in suppressing real talents in chasing the wrong things.  I know because over my long career, I have repeatedly bumped into people like that, mostly in the psychedelics field.  The most recent one was only a few years ago.  He was probably the third or fourth such fake business/faux scientists that I have run into.  Like the other fakes, he probably thought I was clueless after meeting me for the first time (without knowing a thing about me) and then persuaded his smart computer-savvy partner to do without me as their partner.  I still feel sorry for the latter – my potential young computer partner.  His business partner didn’t know my technical history, and probably only noticed my inattention/ADHD.  Please read on:

In all my over 50 years of diversified career, I only applied for one government contract and one government grant.   The contract was with NCI around the mid-1980s and the grant was from NCCAM at the beginning of 2000.  I won both, 5 years apart.  They were 5 years apart because after we (my one-man company & a new computer startup named Ketron as my subcontractor) won the contract, but we didn’t get funded because it was government cronyism – the contract RFP was written for my competitor, the world-famous NAPRALERT database group!  I was so disgusted that I swore not to deal with the cronyism in government again.  Then a friend and colleague persuaded me to go for the NCCAM grant around 2000.   By then, I already had a competent staff, manufacturing facility, and lab.   Both projects are described in my book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career:  “Chapter  8.  David vs. Goliath: NCI SBIR Phase II Database Contract, What if…?”   and  “Chapter 12. What is Wrong with Drugs and Herbal Supplements?”

Now, I am a one-man company again after I came back from retirement to rejoin the psychedelic movement 5 or 6 years ago, because I can see it is heading the same direction towards the vicious cycle (VC) of synthetic drug therapy and herbal supplements.  This VC, per my definition, is going to perpetually ruin our environment and most Americans’ continuing poor health.  It only financially benefits Big Pharma and its interdependent associates like insurance companies, promotors, advertisers, and crooked politicians, but at the expense of most Americans. My plan is to initially start with our totally natural psychedelic mycelia, to bypass or remove the toxic elements of their synthetic counterparts!  This should be our first effort.  One small step at a time.

It shows a practical example of a natural chemical drug, levodopa, can have impurities without unknown brand-new toxic and never-tested synthetic chemicals present.    It is reprinted from My Life & Rollercoaster Career.  “Chapter 4.  Adulthood in America,” below:

“LEVODOPA EXTRACTION AS EXAMPLE OF THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

It was around mid-1970 when I was working for Dr. Madis Laboratories that has since changed hands a few times.  The owner, Dr. Madis, had hired a new plant manager Mr. Guy Riccardi. Guy brought with him a process for making levodopa (l-DOPA) from velvet beans. For your information, levodopa was a new drug for treating Parkinson’s Disease (PD) at that time. But it had some serious toxic side-effects that were allegedly caused by impurities present in the synthetic chemical which could not be removed during its purification process. According to Guy, Dr. George C. Cotzias, a pioneer in using levodopa in treating PD, had done some preliminary study with natural levodopa from velvet beans and found it to have much fewer side-effects than its synthetic counterpart; and he was interested in a source of the natural levodopa.

Guy’s process made use of the reverse osmosis (RO) process to purify this product. The RO process involves the use of a membrane (like a microscopic sieve) of appropriate size through which water and small molecules like levodopa can pass but not large chemicals like protein and carbohydrates, among others. The water solution/filtrate that contains the levodopa can then be easily purified. At that time, RO machines were very expensive. So Dr. Madis asked me to look into an alternative method of isolating levodopa from the beans. I started with literature search and found a couple of patents but none of them worked. One of the better ones actually ended up making a soup and it was very complicated to separate levodopa from it. So, I designed a few experiments for my chemist to try. At the time the only chemist I had was Bob Noll. He was basically an analytical chemist, and a good one. After a few failures playing with messy ‘soups’ an idea came to me. Why try to separate levodopa from the protein and starch soup? Why not fix or trap the big molecules within the beans before even starting to extract the beans with water so that we would have only water and smaller chemicals without proteins or carbohydrates to deal with. So we didn’t mill the beans. Instead, we simply cracked the beans into pieces or a very coarse powder and thoroughly wetted and mixed the beans with acetic acid to denature the proteins. That mixture was simply a damp mass not a mash or suspension. Then, when we poured water into the vessel with the beans and warmed them up to fix the proteins in the beans, there was no more mess. What we got was a regular extract and not a bean soup. After we filtered and concentrated the extract for crystallization, we tested the crystals of levodopa. What we found was a very pleasant surprise. The purity was already over 90%. The time we spent on this project was maybe only three weeks. Since the beans are known to be toxic only because they contain the levodopa, the chances that the purified natural levodopa containing a highly toxic chemical other than levodopa would be slim as opposed to a synthetic levodopa produced from unnatural chemicals reacting with one another to produce totally unknown and potentially highly toxic intermediate compounds that may have never existed in nature before. During my 55 plus years of working with chemicals, the conventional wisdom among chemists is that the synthetic version and the natural version of a chemical are the same as long as they are both pure. But how pure? 98.0% or 99.9%? How about the remaining 2.0% or 0.1% containing a tiny amount of some highly toxic unknown chemical? The USP/NF specifies the purity of levodopa to be containing 98.0% to 102.0%, depending on the analytical methods used. It doesn’t specify 100.00% or even 99.99% (absolute purity or close to it) because the analytical techniques available are not that precise. So, a ‘pure’ chemical always has impurities in it. The impurities in natural chemicals are not brand new to our environment. But those present in synthetic chemicals are totally unknown to us and have absolutely no history of interacting with us. I think you should be aware of these facts.

I suggested to Dr. Madis that we patent this process. He agreed and I wrote up the process. My memory is that at that time you couldn’t put just any person’s name on the patent. This person had to actually have taken part in coming up with the idea or had worked on developing it, not just being the owner of a company and you are then automatically entitled to put your name on the patent application. Otherwise, the patent would be disallowed if others contested it. So, since Dr. Madis’ name was not on the application, he simply shelved it. And I have never heard anything more about this project since. However, Guy knew about this process and the simple rationale behind it.

After I was later fired from Dr. Madis Labs for another matter, I heard rumors that Merck had started a levodopa production facility in Brazil to make the product from velvet beans. I was aware that Guy had been in touch with Merck. But I don’t know if the reason of his contact with Merck was for levodopa production or for seeking employment. I always wonder if the rumors were true, and if so, whether Merck used Riccardi’s RO process or my protein-fixing process. If it is true, I bet it is the latter – a much superior and simpler process.

I have described traditional Chinese herbal medicine more than once or twice before as rich sources of natural cosmetic ingredients in this memoir, in my Newsletter (LCHN) to be republished simultaneously with my memoir, in my Encyclopedia, and elsewhere. In the Encyclopedia, I actually added a whole section on Chinese cosmetic ingredients in its 2^nd and 3^rd editions published in 1996 and 2010 respectively. For people who never had experience or knowledge of Chinese herbs, many of them are turned off by the use of esoteric language in describing their properties. But if you know Chinese herbs and also have been trained in the sciences dealing with them, you can correlate archaic or esoteric language with modern scientific (including pharmacologic) terms. I did just that and figured out some secrets hidden in that ‘mumbo jumbo.’

Hence, during my last consulting period between 1970’s and 2000’s, I consulted for many cosmetic and drug companies, including Avon, Estee Lauder, Roche, and L’Oreal, among others. The most memorable experience was with Avon. Its new facial treatment cream contained retinoids (related to Vitamin A). It was one of its best sellers; but it had a problem. It caused rashes and needed that fixed naturally and fast. There was no time to perform basic R&D. There were some big names in the industry at the time, including a well-known dermatologist Dr. Kligman and a Ph.D. in Pharmacognosy known around the world (see Chapter 8: David versus Goliath: NCI SBIR Phase II Database Contract – What if…?). So Avon started interviewing consultants. As far as I was told, it only interviewed three altogether – the above two, plus me.

In my presentation, I told them I could first give them five herbal extracts for them to test against rashes, and one of them should work. So, I was given a 3-year contract. Probably the conservative thinking of Avon’s technical staff that that research would require years and not months. However, in only weeks, I gave them the five extracts. One worked. It was a magnolia flower bud extract. Avon wanted it right away. Since I was not an approved vender at the time, we had to go through one of Avon’s approved vendors so that there would not be any delay in supplying them with the extract. That seemed to have solved everyone’s problem. Avon was happy; so were its approved vendor and I.