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Nolan Williams, who passed in October of this year, was an interventional neuropsychiatrist and the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab.
His groundbreaking research ranged from rapid-acting plant-based medicines to medical devices that can retrain misfiring brain circuits.
He gave a talk at TED 2025 in April about his latest research the potential of a plant-derived psychoactive compound called Ibogaine to treat traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
We're sharing his talk today in memory of Nolan and to honor the legacy of his work.
It's coming up.
All right, it's 1756.
You're all aboard a British naval vessel headed to the New World.
You're down below deck with your fellow sailors, and you're all sick.
Your legs are swollen, your gums are bleeding, you just lost a tooth.
You go to the ship's doctor and he tells you this is due to internal decay and laziness.
You ask about this foreign fruit medicine, this citrus medicine that you could take, and he tells you that this is not a treatment for what you have.
It's too simple, it's a plant medicine and he's an anti-fruiter.
And instead, he prescribes you arsenic tonics.
True story. and you get worse.
And when you get to the new world, half of your shipmates are deceased.
My name is Nolan Williams and I'm here to talk to you about antifruiters people who weaponize scientific skepticism to thwart new treatments from getting out to the world.
And so Scurvy is an illness that killed two million people, from the time of Columbus all the way through to the time of widespread citrus adoption.
And scurvy is the result of a lack of vitamin C in the diet.
And the reason why these sailors had a lack of vitamin C is because it was a long sea voyage, so you need to eat dried meats and that sort of thing.
And so we observed early on in the 1500s this association between eating citrus fruit and the prevention or the treatment of scurvy.
And so it was written early on that this was a precious medicine, something that could be used for this problem, so much so that it actually birthed the world's first clinical trial.
So the clinical trial as a scientific tool is the result of trying to find a solution for scurvy.
And so they gave all these manmade treatments, and then they gave citrus.
And I don't have to tell you what the answer to this scientific question was.
The people that got the citrus fruit were helping everybody else at the end of the experiment.
But there was a reaction.
The royal societies did not like this idea.
There was backlash and many thought this was too simple to be a solution for such a problem, that a plant could not solve such a complex problem.
And instead, they prescribed arsenic, mercury, man-made chemicals.
Now, science eventually prevailed.
We were able to see that this was actually helpful.
But the problem was that from the time of James Lind's study to the time of widespread implementation, it was more than 100 years.
A million people died.
But this was a war waged against progress by these anti-fruiters.
And it was another 100 years before we even knew what was in the citrus fruit that was improving scurvy right.
We'd rid the world of scurvy at that point.
And so I'm going to switch to a new plant medicine, psychedelics.
Psychedelics have been used for thousands of years by indigenous populations.
The Tabernath iboga root bark of central West Africa was used by the Bwiti for psycho-spiritual purposes for centuries and they knew that this was a powerful compound.
It needed to be done in certain kind of medical-like or medical settings in modern medicine and we need to be able to monitor people because it does have risks like a rare cardiac arrhythmia and death.
And so the modern scourge of sailors, Navy SEALs, isn't scurvy.
It's traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
And the treatments that are out there.
Oral antidepressants and talk therapy do help some people, but they're limited.
And so these veterans have decided, when they don't get improvement from the standard treatments, that some of them have gone out to take psychedelic medicines.
And I was approached by one such veteran, Marcus Capone, him and his wife Amber.
Marcus had been a Navy SEAL for 13 years and suffered many traumatic brain injuries.
Had PTSD once he got out.
And he went down to Mexico, outside of the US as a US soldier, outside of the US, down to a foreign country, to receive a compound that is illegal in the US, a compound that he believed saved his life.
And when I met these folks, I heard the story.
At first I was a little bit skeptical, but then, once I heard Marcus's story and other stories, I became convinced that this was something worth studying.
So now I'm going to let you listen to Eric's story, and you tell me what you think.
I don't know exactly all the reasons why I'm not whole.
I know a lot of the symptoms, like being a basically barely functioning alcoholic my entire life, to the point of neglecting myself, neglecting my kids.
It's so bad that I have like zero control over it.
I haven't gone a day without drinking in probably 10 years.
This is my last chance.
I want to be able to heal myself. so that I can be whole for my family.
So this is the study that we conducted at Stanford.
Just like Eric, most of these folks had PTSD in addition to traumatic brain injury beforehand, but after they had a significant reduction and crossed the line to no longer meet PTSD diagnosis after they received Ibogaine.
Significant reductions in anxiety, 80-plus percent.
Significant reductions in depression.
And remarkably, resolution of disability from traumatic brain injury, something that we haven't seen before.
And so now I'm going to let Eric tell you about that.
It's been about seven months, and pretty much everything is different.
A buddy of mine came by the house the other day.
He had a drink with him.
He drove there.
Hey, you want a drink?
No, man, I'm good.
I don't drink anymore.
He's like...
I'll get you a drink.
I'm like, no, I really don't drink anymore.
He's like, yeah, yeah, whatever.
I'll go get you a drink.
No, he didn't believe me.
I mean, we were standing there talking for probably 30 minutes in that time before I would have smoked five cigarettes, you know.
And he was like, wait a minute, did you quit smoking too?
I was like, yeah.
What?
Everything has changed.
It's hard to tell somebody, like, one weekend and everything's different.
Like some kind of magic pill or something, which it's not.
I mean, the real work started after the experience, but the experience gave me the tools to be able to do the work in the first place.
There are so many people that could heal from this.
There are so many people that would still be here.
I have friends that would still be here.
I have family that would still be here.
So now I'm going to let Eric describe the effect.
What did he feel while he was under this compound?
And what a lot of people will describe is that they go back and look through earlier life memories and they're able to see these memories from a detached third-party perspective and look at them and see them and really re-assimilate them into meaning.
The visuals that I remember the most were like going through like a photo album, but like a Rolodex.
And like you flip it as fast as you can and everything goes by and it's a blur.
It was like flips out of my life.
Like an outsider looking in.
It allowed me to confront reality. traumas that had much more of an impact on me than I realized.
That was one of the biggest things I got from.
The weekend is just like that.
I need to stop poisoning myself in every aspect possible.
So just like citrus for scurvy, psychedelic plant medicines were initially seen as quite positive.
And even the National Institute of Mental Health director in the mid-60s thought that these were potentially powerful therapeutic tools and tools for understanding the brain behavior relationships.
But unlike citrus for scurvy, psychedelic plant medicines, these plant medicines, were made illegal.
Can you imagine how much longer it would have taken for us to be able to get citrus out if we made the orange illegal?
And so, there's hope.
A small group of scientists in the early 2000s, including some in the audience, have been able to get these studies back up and running, some of them all the way through to being evaluated or reevaluated by the FDA very soon.
We're trying to get an investigational new drug application through the FDA right now.
Now, am I telling you to go and run out and go to Mexico and take psychedelics?
No.
You need to wait until everything's done, until the trials are done, to show us that these are positive.
However, What I am saying is that the data shouldn't be evaluated by anti-fruiters.
It shouldn't be evaluated by believers either.
It should be evaluated by open-minded people that are able to look at the data clear-minded.
And what I'm also here to tell you is that these compounds sit on schedule one.
And what that means is that they're on the same level of control as heroin.
It means that there's no medicinal use, and they have a high abuse liability.
And so you can all sit here and think in the 1750s it would have been crazy to make the orange illegal.
What will our grandchildren think about us?
And so we're on this edge between institutional rejection and acceptance in the time.
The clock is ticking.
And I'm going to ask you, did we make the orange illegal?
Only time will tell.
Thank you.
A couple of questions.
I think, for everyone.
It clearly answers that question of whether Eric needed additional help with additional drugs, for example.
Yeah, he was off of everything.
These folks end up needing psychotherapy beforehand and they need a lot of psychotherapy after.
So that is part of it.
But in terms of the drug treatment, Ibogaine, that was it?
That was it.
OK.
One of the things that I learned from you and tell me if I got this right is that the reason why addiction becomes so much of a problem in so many cases is that the more you take a substance, it dials up in your brain the amount of dopamine that you need to feel OK.
And one possible effect of Ibogaine is that it basically resets that relentless scale that is otherwise almost impossible to psychologically do.
Yeah, that's the view.
Is that part of what is going on is that this actually promotes growth factors called glial-derived neurotrophic factor in the brain, which has a role in regulating dopamine neurons?
And so the view is that this kind of resets those dopamine neurons to function pre-addiction-like.
And it's also true, I think, that if you take Ibogaine unsupervised, you risk heart attack.
It's arrhythmia, so an abnormal heart rhythm.
And that's why it's important to do this under supervision.
We think prophylaxing with certain kind of very low-risk cardiac arrhythmia medications like magnesium sulfate can actually reduce the risk quite a bit.
But it is something that needs to be in medical supervision and in cardiac supervision, yeah.
But to be clear, in your sort of study of different kinds of medical interventions, how dramatic is this?
Yeah, I mean, we've never seen such a kind of a broad-acting CNS compound before, right?
In my view, it's one of the most amazing drugs on the planet because of this.
And so, you know, it's like a ...
It's the equivalent of a broad-acting antibiotic that can treat all infections.
It seems to be able to treat this kind of you know, and it's early days so we still have to do a lot of work to prove this totally in Ibogaine.
But you know TBI PTSD depression, that's a really broad effect.
Thank you so much for bringing news of this to TED.
Thank you.
That was Nolan Williams speaking at TED 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
