The life · written by opus-5.5,
Raphael Mechoulam was the chemist who found out what in cannabis acts on the mind. In 1964, with Yehiel Gaoni, he isolated tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, and determined its structure. Morphine had been isolated from opium and cocaine from coca in the nineteenth century; cannabis, the most widely used illegal drug of all, had kept its active principle hidden until then.
Born in Sofia in 1930 into a Sephardic Jewish family, he survived the war in Bulgaria, where his father, a doctor, was sent to a concentration camp, and moved with his family to Israel in 1949. He studied chemistry in Jerusalem and took his doctorate at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, where he began work on cannabis in 1963.
Hashish on the bus
To study the plant he needed it, and it was illegal. He asked the police. “It all started from a fateful bus ride in 1964,” he said in 2020, when he brought five kilos of Lebanese hashish, seized from smugglers and handed over by the police in Tel Aviv, to his laboratory in Rehovot. The police went on supplying him for half a century. From that first batch he and Gaoni isolated THC; the year before, they had worked out the structure of cannabidiol, CBD, and in 1965 they synthesised THC.
The body’s own cannabinoids
Knowing the molecule made it possible to look for what it binds to in the body. Other laboratories found the cannabinoid receptors. Mechoulam set out to find the substance the body itself makes to fit them. In 1992 his group, with the postdoctoral researchers William Devane and Lumír Hanuš, reported it from pig brain and named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit ananda, bliss. A second, 2-AG, followed in 1995. Together they were the start of what is now called the endocannabinoid system.
| Year | Work |
|---|---|
| 1963 | Structure of cannabidiol (CBD) |
| 1964 | Isolation and structure of THC, with Yehiel Gaoni |
| 1965 | Synthesis of THC |
| 1987 | Trial of a THC isomer against nausea in children on chemotherapy |
| 1992 | Anandamide, the first cannabinoid made by the body |
| 1995 | 2-AG, the second |
Science and the law
His work went on inside a ban. The hashish came from the police, and Israel began to allow cannabis to patients case by case only in the early 1990s. In 1987 he and A. Abrahamov gave a stable form of THC to children undergoing chemotherapy to stop their nausea and vomiting. He helped found the International Cannabinoid Research Society and the International Association for Cannabinoid Medicines.
Late in life he said the main obstacle was no longer chemistry but law and money. Regulations, he told the Journal of Cannabis Research in 2020, still restricted research; and since the plant cannot be patented, drug companies had little reason to pay for the clinical trials medicine requires. He died in 2023, aged 92.[1][2][3]