Timothy Leary once characterized himself as being "part of a group of people, who, like Prometheus, have wrestled with the power in order to hand it back to the people."

After decades of struggling with the Establishment, Leary died in his sleep last Friday of cancer in his Beverly Hills home. He was 75.

LSD guru turned 'Net-surfer Leary, who lectured at Harvard for about four years, staged his battle with cancer over the Internet, even promising to transmit his suicide electronically.

But instead of an Internet suicide, Leary's home page relayed the simple message, "Timothy has passed."

Leary, who authored more than 30 works ranging from scholarly studies to novels, promoted a new brand of humanism based on the "heresy" of independent thinking.

Controversial Harvard Days

A major figure in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, Leary began his career of questioning authority at Harvard.

Appointed as a lecturer in clinical psychology in 1959 after earning his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, Leary's experiments with the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin were the subject of a maelstrom of controversy at Harvard.

The Crimson reported on March 25, 1962, that members of the Cen- ter for Research in Personality, the department at which Leary worked, were disputing the right of Leary and fellow psychologist Richard Alpert, then-assistant professor of clinical psychology at the Graduate School of Education, to continue to conduct experiments with psilocybin.

Critics of the two junior faculty members suggested that Leary and Alpert had not handled their project responsibly.

"I wish I could treat this as a scholarly disagreement, but this work violates the values of the academic community," Herbert C. Kelman, Cabot professor of social ethics, then a lecturer on social ethics, then a lecturer on social psychology, told The Crimson in 1962.

According to Pierce Professor of Psychology Robert Rosenthal, who joined Harvard's faculty in 1962, Leary suggested that the students in his introductory graduate course in clinical psychology use psilocybin to garner "insights" into the human psyche.

Leary "managed to sell a lot of students on the idea that you can get wisdom and insight from a pill, that drugs were a short cut," said Henderson Professor of Psychology Brendan A. Maher, who was then acting as the co-chair of the Department of Personality.

Maher said yesterday that Leary's method of research included administering psilocybin to graduate students at informal settings, including parties.

Maher said Leary and Alpert knew little about the side effects of psilocybin and were not trained in pharmacology.

Much of the controversy in 1962 also centered around Alpert and Leary's refusal to explain to their subjects what they might expect from their drug-induced experiences, saying that doing so would be "imposing effects and directing the experience."