Roland L. Fischer

Roland L. Fischer (1915 in Budapest, Hungary – 1997 in Majorca, Spain) was an experimental psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist known for his early work on schizophrenia, the perception-hallucination continuum model of altered states of consciousness, and for his work on gustation which later contributed to research supporting supertasting. Fischer was formerly professor of experimental psychiatry and associate professor of pharmacology at Ohio State University (1958-1971), and also held academic posts at George Washington University, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins University.

Fischer was born in Budapest in 1915. Six months before the start of World War II in 1939, Fischer left Hungary to study chemistry at the University of Basel in Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in 1945. Fischer was active between 1951 and 1977 and was the author of more than 350 publications. In the 1970s, Fischer was a lecturer in pharmacology at the George Washington University Medical School and the Johns Hopkins Medical School and an editor for the Journal of Altered States of Consciousness. At this time, his interests involved biofeedback and EEG research on different states of consciousness. In 1977, he retired to the island of Majorca where he died in 1997. In gratitude for the opportunities for engaging in teaching and research offered in his late days by the University of the Balearic Islands, he donated his personal collection of books to the library of the University of the Balearic Islands.

Like German chemist Kurt Beringer (1893-1949) before him, Fischer began looking for an explanatory model of psychosis for schizophrenia in the late 1940s by comparing it to altered states produced by hallucinogens. In the 1950s, Fischer studied schizophrenia as a research biochemist at the University of Saskatchewan. Fischer explored the model psychosis hypothesis of altered drug states originally studied by Beringer in 1927. Fischer and other researchers wondered if LSD could act as a chemical model for schizophrenia. However, as biochemical research progressed over time, the theory was rejected as newer evidence showed that both substance-induced psychosis and organic psychosis are remarkably different.

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