Apple Pioneer Bill Atkinson Was a Secret Evangelist of the ‘God Molecule’

Bill Atkinson was a computing pioneer who, in the 1980s, effectively made Apple computers usable for everyday people by transforming code into windows, menus, and graphics.

But few people know that later in life he was a secret advocate of what’s widely considered the world’s most potent psychedelic: 5-MeO-DMT.

The hallucinogen, also called “the God molecule,” is a compound found in the venomous secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad named Incilius alvarius (it’s commonly called Bufo alvarius) and is known to bring about ego death, a total dissolution of the senses, and a euphoric feeling of existential connectedness, all in a roughly 20-minute trip. Atkinson, who died from pancreatic cancer on June 5 at the age of 74, was a member of a close-knit, private online community of 5-MeO-DMT enthusiasts called OneLight, where he went by the alias “Grace Within.”

Several of Atkinson’s friends and fellow psychonauts tell WIRED their “beloved” Atkinson played a key role in helping people access smaller doses of 5-MeO-DMT, which can be made synthetically, as he believed it would maximize the benefits of the potentially dangerous drug while minimizing harm. “The same creative mind who affected personal computers so profoundly continued to influence human evolution through his efforts to make the miracle of ‘bufo’ safer and more manageable,” says friend Charles Lindsay, an artist who has worked with the SETI Institute, which works to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. “He truly pushed boundaries. That requires a willingness to consider what might easily be deemed ridiculous.” Or, he adds, “risky.”

Many people have reported benefits to their mental health thanks to smoking 5-MeO-DMT, and biotech companies are preparing advanced trials to test the drug as a treatment for depression and addiction. Former heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson, longevity guru Bryan Johnson, and podcaster Joe Rogan have told of transcendent, life-changing experiences under the influence of the powerful drug.

But 5-MeO-DMT remains illegal in the US, and while underground options exist, people often go to legal centers and retreats in Mexico to take strong doses.

Atkinson took “many hundreds” of 5-MeO-DMT trips, according to friend Jamis MacNiven, the founder of popular Silicon Valley diner Buck’s of Woodside. “Nobody hit it harder than Bill,” he says.

The 5-MeO-DMT experience, with its daunting ego death awaiting within seconds of smoking the molecule, can be discombobulating, and a sometimes fraught period afterward can lead to serious destabilization and lasting trauma. Comedian Chelsea Handler had a “scary” trip, which she said left her “feeling as sick as I’ve ever felt.”

But at lower doses, known as “handshakes,” the 5-MeO-DMT trip provides a gentler experience without the ego death—which can, at its onset, be terrifying—and the subsequent sensation of oneness. The trip still lasts roughly the same amount of time, and while people can sometimes react with unexpected sensitivity, it enables users to enter into more of a meditative state than with “full release” doses.

Wishing to spread the gospel about how to use the drug more responsibly, six sources confirmed to WIRED that Atkinson was behind a pseudonymously published manual that contains step-by-step production photos detailing how to produce lower-dose 5-MeO-DMT vape pens known as “LightWands.” The guide was published online, on the psychedelic educational nonprofit Erowid. It was first posted in 2021, before it was updated in the month before Atkinson’s death. Atkinson collaborated with the makers of the pens—also members of OneLight—to help refine the manufacturing process and make the vaporization process safer, friends say.

“My deepest gratitude goes first to this amazing molecule and to all those who have given of their heart, mind, and courage to bring it to our world,” Atkinson wrote pseudonymously on Erowid, outlining how “many of the most beautiful and healing insights are found at lower levels of Jaguar.” (Jaguar is the name given by psychologist and psychedelics pioneer Ralph Metzner to 5-MeO-DMT.)

Atkinson—who was also a keen nature photographer—first smoked 5-MeO-DMT in 2012, according to OneLight member Axle Davids, but his relationship with psychedelics goes back much further. In 1985, Atkinson took LSD. He wrote about that experience in 2020: “For the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.” He explained how his LSD trip inspired him to develop HyperCard, a Mac application that wove text, graphics, and sound together in a format that predated the World Wide Web and popularized hyperlinking. “I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge,” he wrote.

In his final years, he gave away up to 1,000 LightWand kits containing low- to medium-dose 5-MeO-DMT pens and mentored other creators in the OneLight community, according to Davids. Giving people access to lower doses is important, particularly because some are “hypersensitive” to 5-MeO-DMT, he says: “They can lose consciousness. They can purge and choke on their vomit. They can lose their shit entirely.”

One Zoom recording, which WIRED has seen, shows Atkinson discussing with other OneLight members highly technical aspects of how best to dilute the molecule into a vaporizable solution. Atkinson improved 5-MeO-DMT pens “with an engineer’s precision,” Davids, a brand strategist who runs a separate collective related to the use of 5-MeO-DMT, wrote in a Substack post in July. “Using himself as the test subject, he tracked blood pressure, EEG data, and other physiological signals.”

Atkinson’s widow, Cai Atkinson, who he married two years ago, tells WIRED he “passionately and unconditionally donated great numbers of sets of pens in the past several years to help to lower the barrier for new practitioners and new users, so more people may have access to this healing vehicle. He continuously improved the details and [taught] many people who are interested in this.”

But some of Atkinson’s friends had concerns about his approach, given the risks of the drug. “Sometimes we’d say, ‘Well, do you really want to pass them out so freely?’” says MacNiven, a member of another 5-MeO-DMT practitioner community. Atkinson, who attended Burning Man in 2024 for the third time, “was a real proselytizer,” adds MacNiven, who despite his occasional misgivings believes “overall there’s a benefit to get more pens into more hands.”

Atkinson’s use of “the God molecule” appeared to contribute toward a spiritual shift and an interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, says MacNiven. “Bill was a completely non-spiritual guy in the beginning,” he says. “Then he became extremely spiritual, talking about past lives and future lives.”

According to a “Request for Prayers” Atkinson posted on the OneLight forum in November 2024, revealing his identity to the wider community and disclosing he had terminal cancer, he said he had taken the intense African psychedelic iboga in 2017 and that it helped him accept death. “From my Iboga experience seven years ago, I know for certain that my consciousness will continue after I leave my body behind,” Atkinson wrote, signing off the letter with his name instead of his pseudonym. “I have no existential fear of death. Actually more anticipation and curiosity.”

In March, Michael Fratkin, a palliative care doctor and OneLight member, went to Atkinson’s house near Palo Alto to meet him for the first time after extensively corresponding and sharing Zoom calls. Fratkin says Atkinson told him that his psychedelic experiences had, in part thanks to 5-MeO-DMT, given him “a sense of peace about the transition out of this flesh-based existence into a more unified and universal diffuse existence in the oneness of everything.”

The pair also discussed how Atkinson wanted to be remembered, and “what he thought about the afterlife,” Fratkin recalls. They began cooking up a “crazy and unassailable plan” in which Atkinson would send messages to Fratkin through birds from beyond the grave to prove he was interacting with other spirits.

Atkinson’s death, however, came before they had agreed on the exact methods. But he died, Fratkin says, with “a trust for the medicine [5-MeO-DMT]” and a sense of “delight about the ripples that his little gizmos were sending out into the world.”