Something else began to interrupt the study. Lilly had been researching the mind-altering powers of the drug LSD since the early 1960s. The wife of Ivan Tors, the producer of the dolphin movie Flipper, had first introduced him to it at a party in Hollywood. “John and Ivan Tors were really good friends,” says Ric O’Barry of the Dolphin Project (an organisation that aims to stop dolphin slaughter and exploitation around the world) and a friend of Lilly’s at the time. “Ivan was financing some of the work on St Thomas. I saw John go from a scientist with a white coat to a full blown hippy,” he remembers.

For the actor Jeff Bridges, who was introduced to Lilly by his father Lloyd, Lilly’s self-experimentation with LSD was just part of who he was. “John Lilly was above all an explorer of the brain and the mind, and all those drugs that expand our consciousness,” reflects Bridges. “There weren’t too many people with his expertise and his scientific background doing that kind of work.”

In the 1960s a small selection of neuroscientists like John Lilly were licensed to research LSD by the American government, convinced that the drug had medicinal qualities that could be used to treat mental-health patients. As part of this research, the drug was sometimes injected into animals and Lilly had been using it on his dolphins since 1964, curious about the effect it would have on them.