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individuals thought it possible to take DMT during lunch, and so it gained . . . wll the dubious nickname, "businessman's trip." those in lower animals, by which the human body made DMT. DMT thus became the first endogenous human psychedelic.’* 48 + THE BUILDING BLOCKS Despite Szara's and others' steady production of research papers about DMT, it remained mostly a pharmacological curiosity: intense, short-lived, and found in plants. Clearly, LSD had a leg up on DMT when it came to making a significant impression on the psychiatric research community. This all changed, however, when researchers discovered DMT in the brains of mice and rats, and then uncovered the pathways by which these ani- mals' bodies made this powerful psychedelic. Did DMT exist in the human body? It seemed likely, because scien- tists had discovered DMT-forming enzymes in samples of human lung tissue while searching for those same enzymes in other animals. The race was on. In 1965 a research team from Germany published a paper in the flagship British science journal Nature announcing that they had isolated DMT from human blood. In 1972 Nobel-prize winning scien- tist Julius Axelrod of the U.S. National Institutes of Health reported finding it in human brain tissue. Additional research showed that DMT could also be found in human urine and the cerebrospinal fluid bathing the brain. It was not long before scientists discovered the pathways, similar to Endogenous means that a compound is made in the body: endo, "within," and genous, "generated" or "formed." Endogenous DMT, then, is DMT made within the body. There are other endogenous compounds with which we've become familiar over the years. For example, endo- genous mor/j/ime-like compounds are endorphins. However, the discovery of DMT in the human body stimulated much less fanfare than did that of endorphins. As we will see later in this chap- ter, anti-psychedelic-drug sentiment sweeping the country at the time actually turned researchers against studying endogenous DMT. The dis- coverers of endorphins, in contrast, won Nobel Prizes.