Roger Heim

Roger Jean Heim (1900-1979) was a French mycologist, ecologist, and director of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris who became, with R. Gordon Wasson, the leading scientific authority on the hallucinogenic mushrooms of Mexico. His identification and laboratory cultivation of the mushrooms used in Mazatec ceremonies provided the biological material from which Albert Hofmann at Sandoz isolated Psilocybin, and his collaboration with Wasson placed him on the same 1956 expedition that the CIA had secretly penetrated through MKULTRA chemist James Moore.¹

Scientist and Resistance Deportee

Born in Paris on February 12, 1900, Heim trained as a chemical engineer at the École Centrale before turning to the study of fungi, completing a doctoral thesis on the genus Inocybe in 1931. He became sub-director of the cryptogamy laboratory at the Muséum in 1933 and a member of the Académie des sciences. When World War II broke out he joined the French Resistance, was denounced, and was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Mauthausen and its Gusen subcamp in Austria, where he survived fourteen months. After the war he resumed his scientific career and served as director of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle from 1951 to 1965.²

The Mexican Mushrooms

After Wasson's celebrated 1955 participation in a María Sabina velada at Huautla de Jimenez, Heim joined the Wassons' 1956 expedition to the Sierra Mazateca to study the mushrooms scientifically. He identified the sacred species as members of the genus Psilocybe (including Psilocybe mexicana), brought specimens back to Paris, and succeeded in cultivating them in his laboratory. Heim then sent cultivated fruiting bodies to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz in Basel, whose team isolated and identified the active alkaloids psilocybin and psilocin in 1958. Heim and Wasson published their joint study, Les Champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique, in 1958 through the Muséum, the founding scientific text of the field Wasson named ethnomycology.¹

The 1956 expedition Heim joined was, unknown to him, also carrying a CIA agenda. James Moore, a chemist working under the Agency's Geschickter Fund for Medical Research conduit as part of MKULTRA Subproject 58, had attached himself to the same expedition in the hope of obtaining the mushrooms for the CIA before Sandoz could synthesize their active compound. Moore returned with a bag of mushrooms but was beaten to the chemistry by Hofmann, working from Heim's cultivated material.³