[SOURCE: www.marijuana.com]
In the early 1960s, a young postdoctoral student stumbled onto something that puzzled him.
After reading the literature on cannabis, he was surprised to see that while the active compound in morphine had been isolated from opium poppies 100 years before and cocaine isolated from coca leaves around the same time, the active component of marijuana was still unknown.
This simple observation launched his life’s work.
That young Israeli researcher, Raphael Mechoulam, is now a heavily decorated scientist, recently nominated for the prestigious Rothschild Prize. More than 50 years ago, however, he had trouble starting his scientific journey.
For starters, he needed cannabis to study and didn’t know how to obtain it. Eventually, he obtained his research supply from friends in the police department. The young scientist was in a hurry, and didn’t want to wait to cut through the red tape required by Israel’s Health Ministry.
“Yes, I broke the law,” he told me when I met with him in Tel Aviv last year, “but I apologized and explained what I was trying to do.”It’s a good thing the Israeli government didn’t stall his progress, because Mechoulam was moving at breakneck speed.
By 1963, he determined the structure of cannabidiol (CBD), an important component of marijuana. A year later, he became the first person to isolate delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Over the ensuing decades, Mechoulam and his team continued to isolate numerous compounds from the cannabis plant.
Whole story here: ‘The Entourage Effect’ of Medical Marijuana'
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