MICHAEL HOROWITZ is co-director (with Cynthia Palmer) of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library (the nation's largest psychoactive drug library), and co-editor (also with Palmer) of Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Writings on Psychedelics and Sisters of the Extreme: Women Writing on the Drug Experience. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including High Times, Integration, and Robert Forte’s festschrift for Timothy Leary titled Outside Looking In. Horowitz was Leary’s archivist, and in 1988 he published An Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary. Horowitz also operates Flashback Books, a rare book venture geared towards drug titles.

LAURA HUXLEY was an accomplished concert violinist in her youth. She later produced documentary films, played in a major Symphony Orchestra, was assistant film editor at RKO, and studied health, nutrition, and psychology. She worked as a psychological counselor, a lecturer, and a seminarist in the human potential movement. In 1956 she married Aldous Huxley, and together they explored ways of opening the mind to new levels of consciousness. After his death in 1963, Laura wrote This Timeless Moment, a book describing her life with her husband, and she later penned You Are Not the Target, Between Heaven and Earth, Oneaday Reason to be Happy, and The Child of Your Dreams (with co-author Piero Ferrucci). In 1977 she founded Our Ultimate Investment (OUI), a non-profit organization dedicated to the nurturing of the possible human, and in April 1994 in Los Angeles: Laura's Foundation sponsored the highly successful four-day Conference entitled, Children: Our Ultimate Investment. This event honored the centenary of the birth of Aldous Huxley by addressed the issues of children's conditions in our present society. Laura has received widespread recognition for her humanistic achievements, which include an Honorary doctor of Human Services from Sierra University, Honoree of the United Nations, Fellow of the International Academy of Medical Preventics, and Honoree of the World Health Foundation for Development and Peace, from which she received the Peace Prize in 1990.

KARL JANSEN, M.D., Ph.D., is a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the world's leading expert on ketamine. He has studied ketamine at every level: from photographing the receptors to which ketamine binds in the human brain, to publishing numerous papers on his discovery of the similarities between ketamine's psychoactive effect and the near-death experience. His writing has appeared in over 30 medical journals and popular magazines. Jansen's recent book, Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, is a tour de force and the authoritative tome on the subject. Dr. Jansen is currently a practicing psychiatrist in New Zealand; e-mail K@BTInternet.com.

DAN JOY is coauthor of Better Sex Through Chemistry: A Guide to the New Pro-sexual Drugs and Nutrients and The Healing Magic of Cannabis. He was a writer and editor on the third edition of Peter Stafford's Psychedelics Encyclopedia and editor of the Shulgin's PIHKAL and TIHKAL. His articles have appeared in High Times, Brain/Mind Bulletin, bOING-bOING, Science Fiction Eye, The Resonance Project, and other magazines.

JAMES KENT is a writer, programmer, DJ, publisher, and underground media specialist living in Seattle, Washington. He is the Publisher at Large for Trip magazine; is the former Editor of Psychedelic Illuminations magazine; is Chief Archivist for the Shaman Cancer Research Institute, an organization dedicated to the collection and propagation of anecdotes, information, and protocols relating to the treatment of cancer and chronic viral infection through traditional shamanic methods; DJs and produces House and Downtempo music under the name Genetic Imperative; and programs Resonant Radio--a 24-hour Internet broadcast featuring only the best in underground psychedelic music, sponsored by Radio Free SLAM.

STEPHEN KENT is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who has become one of the most acclaimed didjeridu players on the contemporary global music scene. Kent grew up in Britain and East Africa, and learned to play didjeridu while working in Australia during the early 1980s as musical director of Circus Oz. After spending time among Aborigines in the Northern Territory, the didjeridu became a focal part of his music. He has performed in the groups Lights in a Fat City, Trance Mission, The Beasts of Paradise, and Megadrums, as well as with Steve Roach, Kenneth Newby, and Terence McKenna. Kent also programs a weekly World Music radio show.

JARON LANIER is a computer scientist, composer, musician, visual artist, and author. He serves as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative (a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2), and is a visiting faculty member at numerous schools. He's the Chief Scientist of Eyematic Interfaces, which researches computer vision. He serves as an advisor for the Board of Councilors of the University of Southern California, Medical Media Systems, Microdisplay Corporation, and NY3D. Lanier's "Phenotropics" rejects traditional protocol-based approaches in favor of statistical and pattern-recognition techniques to bind software components together in order to improve large scale reliability. Lanier, who coined the term "virtual reality" is best known for his work in VR development. In the early '80s he founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late '80s he lead the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head-mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first "avatar" representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he co-developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for TV production, and other areas. He lead the team that developed the first widely-used software platform architecture for immersive VR applications. Sun Microsystems acquired VPL's seminal portfolio of patents related to VR and networked 3-D graphics in 1999. Lanier's writings address the topics of high-technology business, the social impact of technological practices, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism. He has been working on his book Technology and the Future of the Human Soul, and his writing has appeared in numerous journals. He's regularly featured on TV shows and has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Encyclopaedia Britannica includes him in its list of history's 300 or so greatest inventors. For more information, click here.

MARK McCLOUD is an artist and ex-art professor who for nearly three decades has been collecting perforated blotter art used to distribute LSD. He has acted as a curator for numerous exhibits of this art, showing parts of his collection (likely the world's largest), and has won two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Most of his collection is made up of prints that were never dosed, and those that may have been are exposed to ultraviolet radiation which neutralizes any acid that they might have contained.) According to McCloud, "The first blotter known was a pair of some guy's underwear that was used to clean up a spill. It was passed around from person to person for months." Due to his collection of unique American Folk Art, McCloud has been threatened, set up, and busted by government authorities, as well as being subject to nearly constant surveillance. McCloud was acquitted from an LSD conspiracy charge in 1992, only to be charged again, and again acquitted in 2001.

TERENCE McKENNA spent the last three decades of his life studying the ontological foundations of shamanism and the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation. He traveled extensively in the Asian and New World Tropics, and become specialized in the shamanism and ethnomedicine of the Amazon Basin. With his brother Dennis, he was the author of The Invisible Landscape and Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Growers' Guide. His own titles included Food of the Gods, a study of the impact of psychotropic plants on human culture and evolution, The Archaic Revival, a book of essays and conversations, and True Hallucinations, an autobiographical adventure tale. Sadly, Terence passed away in April of 2000, after a fight with brain cancer. More than anyone else in recent times, it was Terence McKenna who sparked renewed interest in pharmaceutically enhanced states of altered consciousness.

RALPH METZNER has been exploring states of consciousness and transformational practices for over thirty years. He is a psychotherapist and a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches courses on altered states of consciousness and ecopsychology. He is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books, including The Psychedelic Experience (with Leary and Alpert), Maps of Consciousness, The Well of Remembrance, and The Unfolding Self. He is co-founder and president of the Green Earth Foundation, an educational organization devoted to the healing and harmonizing of the relations between humanity and the Earth. His two most recent books are: Green Psychology--Transforming our Relationship to the Earth and an edited volume Ayahuasca--Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature. He has recently released his companion volume on Teonanácatl.