Tripping on utopia

The generation that survived the Second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. At the centre of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists - and star-crossed lovers - Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, they made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion. Their partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the 20th century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists and the founders of the Information Age.