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THE PINEAL: MEET THE SPIRIT GLAND «+ 65 of melatonin. There was only one way for me to find out if melatonin was psychedelic, and that was to administer it to my own human volunteers. After completing my psychiatric residency, I spent a year in Fairbanks, Alaska, working at the local community mental health center. My experi- ence in the Arctic introduced me to the new field of "winter depression." This syndrome revitalized interest in the human biology of the pineal gland and melatonin. Research into their role in winter depression held promise for helping us understand and treat a wide range of seasonal human syndromes. This astonishing coincidence provided me a context for beginning to probe the pineal's mysteries. However, I knew little about human research, so I sought ways to further my training. I moved to San Diego to take up a year-long fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California. I learned how to write scientific proposals and grants, design experiments, and ad- minister research drugs in a clinical environment. I gave and scored rating scales, collected blood and other biological samples, and analyzed and wrote up data. Following a San Diego colleague, Jonathan Lisansky, M.D., to Albu- querque, I began working under the guidance of Glenn Peake, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist. Glenn was the Scientific Director of the Uni- versity of New Mexico's General Clinical Research Center, an outstanding research site funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Glenn, Jonathan, and I performed a comprehensive three-year study of melato- nin effects in normal human volunteers. Out of this emerged the first, and so far only, documented role for melatonin in human physiology: melato- nin contributes to the early morning drop in body temperature. There is a daily rhythm in many biological functions in humans. One of the most robust is body temperature, in which there is a sharp dip at 3 AM. This also is when melatonin levels are highest. We studied nineteen male volunteers who stayed awake all night in light that was bright enough to prevent any melatonin formation. The drop in body temperature was not nearly as deep as normal in these melatonin- deprived men, and we wondered if the lack of melatonin was responsible.