Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman's IFAS Research Partnership

Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman’s partnership carried psychedelic research from an informal circle of Ampex colleagues into a dedicated research foundation, then into a more covert institutional setting after the foundation closed. Their work joined a practical interest in guided LSD sessions to a larger ambition: exploring whether psychedelic experiences could help people exceed habitual limits in creativity and personality.

From Ampex colleagues to research partners

Stolaroff and Harman’s collaboration took shape among engineers and colleagues at Ampex. After Stolaroff’s first LSD experience, he shared what had happened with a small group that met periodically to discuss spiritual questions and the possibility that LSD might help healthy people realize more of their potential. Harman, then a Stanford electrical-engineering professor, joined the group alongside young Ampex engineer Don Allen. Al Hubbard began visiting Menlo Park to guide the group’s psychedelic journeys and train members to guide others. Stolaroff later remembered Hubbard as an exceptional therapist; Allen recalled him as both an inspiration and the group’s resident expert.

The group’s interests reached into the workplace. With Hubbard’s help, Stolaroff tried to reshape Ampex into what he envisioned as the first psychedelic corporation. Hubbard led weekly workshops at company headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The project foundered when Ampex’s general manager objected to the Christian images Hubbard brought into his office. Meanwhile, Harman shifted some of his teaching at Stanford toward human potential, ending a new course with a unit on psychedelics. The episode shows the partners’ shared concern with expanding human capacities, but also how their plans could meet resistance within conventional institutions.

Building the International Foundation for Advanced Study

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to devote himself full-time to psychedelic research. He and Harman established the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS), explicitly organized to explore LSD’s potential to enhance personality and creativity. Stolaroff recruited psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman as staff psychologist; Allen also left Ampex to work as a screener and guide. The foundation obtained an FDA research permit and supplies of LSD and mescaline from Hubbard, then began treating clients.

IFAS brought the partners’ interests into a formal research program. Over six years, the foundation worked with about 350 people, most described as healthy participants rather than patients with severe psychiatric illness. The package cost five hundred dollars and included personality testing before and after a guided LSD session, as well as follow-up. Hubbard remained an influential presence, coming and going as an adviser and expert; he also took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its primordial landscape conducive to revelatory experience. The arrangement combined Stolaroff and Harman’s institutional project with Hubbard’s practical guidance and the broader network of psychedelic researchers he helped connect.

One strand of the foundation’s work tested whether LSD could help people make progress on creative problems. Working in groups of four, Fadiman and Harman gave the same dose to artists, engineers, architects, and scientists who felt stuck on particular projects. The researchers deliberately shaped participants’ expectations and surroundings, and subjects reported more fluid thinking, stronger visualization, and an improved ability to reframe problems. William English and Doug Engelbart were among the participants. The study was not controlled, depended on participants’ own assessments, and ended before completion, so it could not establish the claims its advocates hoped to investigate. It nevertheless records how Harman’s partnership with Stolaroff connected psychedelic research to creative work beyond the clinic.

A shared project after IFAS

IFAS had closed by 1966, but the partnership’s aims did not simply end with it. In 1968, Harman, now working at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), called Stolaroff’s former collaborator Hubbard out of semiretirement. Harman led SRI’s Educational Policy Research Center, whose mandate was to envision the future of education. LSD had become illegal, though it remained in use among engineers and academics around Stanford. Hubbard, then broke, was hired part-time as a special investigative agent, ostensibly to monitor drug use in the student movement; Harman’s employment letter described concern that such use might function as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. Hubbard also used government contacts to help keep SRI contracts flowing.

The account distinguishes this official cover from the work Harman and Hubbard reportedly continued. The stated mission—to provide LSD experiences to political and intellectual leaders around the world—apparently survived the closure of IFAS and the change in the drug’s legal status. Harman later said that Hubbard had done nothing resembling security work and that his actual job was to run special sessions. This evidence concerns Harman’s later collaboration with Hubbard rather than proving that Stolaroff himself took part in SRI’s sessions; it does, however, place that episode in the institutional aftermath of the project he and Harman had built together.

Influence beyond the foundation

The partnership’s significance lies partly in the connections it made possible. IFAS brought researchers, guides, and participants into a sustained program at a time when psychedelic work was spreading through networks as well as formal institutions. Hubbard’s repeated visits linked Menlo Park to other research centers, while the foundation’s work with healthy participants and creative professionals widened the questions being asked beyond treatment of illness.

That network also outlasted the legal and institutional conditions that had supported the first program. Later underground guides traced professional lineages through figures including Hubbard and Timothy Leary, and Myron Stolaroff’s account of Leo Zeff’s work described the underground practice as one source of evidence informing the research revival beginning in the late 1990s. The book likewise describes traffic between underground guides and university researchers, including consultation on music used in guided psilocybin sessions. Stolaroff and Harman’s collaboration is therefore presented not only as the founding of IFAS, but as part of a transmission of methods and ambitions that continued after the foundation itself disappeared.