Timothy Leary on Erowid

Timothy Francis Leary was born is Springfield, Massachusetts in 1920. He attended West Point in the early '40s (where he didn't exactly fit in) and then served in the military during WWII. He earned his PhD in psychology from U.C. Berkeley and taught there briefly but moved to Harvard after his first wife's death. He first took psilocybin mushrooms in 1960 during a trip to Mexico. When he returned to Harvard he began the Harvard Psilocybin Project, studying the effects of psilocybin on humans. As part of the project he, along with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, gave psilocybin to a series of volunteers including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Arthur Koestler, among others.

Check out the Erowid page with its goodies. (Thanks Kieran)