Bruce Damer was camped in the Amazon rainforest. The scientist and biochemistry researcher had traveled to this spot in remote Peru in 2013. Inside a wooden maloca—a teepee-shaped structure—and guided by Indigenous shamans, he spent days drinking foul-tasting ayahuasca, a brew of two hallucinogenic Amazonian plants.
One evening, a full moon hung over the rainforest. Amid the sounds of monkeys, grasshoppers, and the shamans’ chants to forest spirits, Damer saw madre ayahuasca. He asked her, “Would you like to do this? How about we join together and travel and try to figure out how we were all born?”
Before he knew it, Damer experienced a vision of himself sling-shotting back through his life, conception, and witnessed “a sperm swimming backward into various ancestors.” He was pulled backward through 4 billion years of evolutionary time until he reached a dense microbial cloud. He burst through the vapor and arrived in a harsh Hadean landscape; a hot, volcanic world with freshwater hot springs filled with a primordial soup under a sky streaked with meteors and chemical haze.
There, he invited the madre to help him become a protocell, a precursor to evolution. In the vision, he watched himself split, merge, dry out, and rehydrate. “My body was this undulating, amphiphilic sac just stretching out in front of me,” Damer said.
This scene is from "The Psychedelic Scientist," a captivating profile of Damer by journalist Mattha Busby in the latest issue of Nautilus. Damer argues psychedelic experiences can not only help people get over personal psychological hurdles but lead to scientific breakthroughs. And Damer has the experience to prove it. Psychedelics, he said, helped him solve one of science's longest and most difficult questions: how life on Earth began.
Busby had been covering the psychedelic renaissance for magazines such as Vice, Rolling Stone, and Wired, when in 2024 a neuroscientist researching psychedelics told the journalist he had to meet Damer and hear his stories. "So, I listened to a podcast by Damer while I was sitting on a beach in Vancouver, a tale about him becoming the first protocell under the influence of ayahuasca," Busby said. "I knew this was a profile for me."
And now for you, Nautilus readers.
