Andrew Thomas Weil (, born June 8, 1942) is an American celebrity doctor who advocates for alternative medicine including the 4-7-8 breathing technique. Early life and education Early years Andrew Thomas Weil was born in Philadelphia on June 8, 1942, the only child of parents who operated a millinery store, in a family that was Reform Jewish. He graduated from high school in 1959 and was awarded a scholarship from the American Association for the United Nations, giving him the opportunity to go abroad for a year, living with families in India, Thailand, and Greece. From this experience he became convinced that in many ways American culture and science was insular and unaware of non-American practices. He began hearing that mescaline enhanced creativity and produced visionary experiences, and finding little information on the subject, he read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. Undergraduate period Weil entered Harvard University in 1960, majoring in biology with a concentration in ethnobotany. He had an early curiosity regarding psychoactive drugs, and in that period, met Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and separately engaged in organized experimentation with mescaline. Weil would write for and eventually serve as an editor of the Harvard Crimson. One published account of the period describes a falling out of Weil from the group that included the faculty—among whom the experimentation with drugs was contentious, and with regard to undergraduates, proscribed; the falling out involved an exposé on drug-use and supply that Weil wrote for the Crimson. Weil wrote of faculty experimentation with drugs in a series of Crimson pieces: "Better Than a Damn", (February 20, 1962), his apparent first Crimson piece; "Alpert Defends Drugs on 'Open End," (May 27, 1963); and "Investigation Unlikely in Dismissal of Alpert", (May 29, 1963). and that this reporting included the claim that "undergraduates had indeed been able to obtain access to psilocybin from members" of the Harvard faculty research team that was involved in such research. As late as 1973, Weil's name appears in conjunction with an editorial regarding the 1963 firing of Alpert, which stated the view that it would be "unfortunate if the firing of Richard Alpert led to the suppression of legitimate research into the effects of hallucinogenic compounds", distancing himself and the Crimson from the "shoddiness of their work as scientists ... less [the result] of incompetence than of a conscious rejection of scientific ways of looking