On November 22, 1963, the world was fixated on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the death of Aldous Huxley that same day passed almost unnoticed. Unable to speak because of laryngeal cancer, Huxley wrote a final request to his wife Laura: LSD, 100 micrograms, intramuscular. This episode traces the life that led to that extraordinary exit, from British scientific royalty and a childhood eye disease that left him nearly blind, to Eton (where a young Eric Blair, later George Orwell, sat in his unruly French class), a chemical plant job that fed the sterile vision of Brave New World, and a highly paid stint as an MGM screenwriter in Hollywood.

We follow Huxley into Vedanta and The Perennial Philosophy, the controversial Bates method and the awkward banquet where he was caught reading with a magnifying glass, his admitted lack of a mind ...