states of consciousness led him to study the pineal gland hormone melatonin in the 1980s, at which time there were suggestive data regarding its psychoactive effects. This research took place at the University of New Mexico's School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where he became a tenured associate professor of psychiatry. He first developed a model of all-night suppression of melatonin by all-night bright light. He then established a successful exogenous melatonin infusion protocol that replicated endogenous melatonin levels in the bright-light conditions. All-night bright-light suppression of melatonin suppressed the normal trough of body temperature seen between 3-4 a.m., the time of maximum melatonin levels. Exogenous infusion of melatonin, replicating endogenous levels in the bright-light condition (in which endogenous melatonin was suppressed) reestablished the normal core body temperature trough. But melatonin's psychoactive effects were only sedative, leading him to focus on DMT in his future work. Research into DMT From 1990 to 1995, Strassman led a government-funded clinical research team at the University of New Mexico studying the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT, on human subjects in experimental conditions. The research continued from his work on melatonin. Strassman's studies between 1990 and 1995 aimed to experimentally investigate DMT's effects. DMT is a powerful psychedelic drug found in hundreds of plants and every mammal that has been studied. It is made primarily in mammalian lung tissue and is related to serotonin and melatonin. As a result of his research, Strassman came to call DMT the "spirit molecule" because its effects include many features of religious experience, such as visions, voices, disembodied consciousness, powerful emotions, novel insights, and feelings of overwhelming significance. During the project's five years, he administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to nearly 60 human volunteers. Strassman was the first in 20 years to legally administer psychedelics to people in the United States, and his research has widely been regarded as kicking off the "psychedelic renaissance", in which many psychedelic compounds have begun to be scientifically studied for the first time since the early 1970s. Strassman characterized DMT's biological and psychological effects in his first set of dose-response studies, effects consistent with activation of central and/or peripheral serotonin receptors. His team published a companion article describing the psychological effects and preliminary results of a new rating scale, the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, or HRS. Researchers have widely accepted the HRS as a sensitive and specific measure of the psychological