Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, also known as Lady Neidpath, sits cross-legged on a bench on a tiny island at the center of an artificial pond in her English country estate, a 15-minute drive outside of Oxford. At her feet is a tiny pure-white cloud of a dog, which traipses around chewing on the grass, only occasionally coughing it up.

Feilding is 75 years old. She wears a black skirt and knee-high boots and grips a tan shawl around her shoulders, on account of this being a gray November morning. From her ears hang jewelry that looks like green rock candy. Her light brown hair is frizzy but not altogether unkempt.

In the distance, peeking over a towering hedge, is her castle, built in the 1520s. “In the ’60s we called it Brainblood Hall,” she says in a posh accent that periodically turns sing-songy and high, à la Julia Child. “We always saw it as the masthead from where this change would happen.”

Feilding now lives in the castle in the English countryside where she was raised. Ren Rox for WIRED

This change being the de-villainization of lysergic acid diethylamide, more commonly known as LSD. Feilding believes LSD has tremendous potential to treat maladies like anxiety and depression and addiction. The theory goes that the drug can manipulate blood flow in the brain to “reset” what you might consider to be the ego, allowing patients to reconceptualize their issues. Hence Brainblood Hall.

If LSD is having its renaissance, Feilding is its Michelangelo. She works 15 hours a day, seven days a week, to coordinate—and contribute to—research on one of the most highly controlled substances on Earth. And not with any old dumpy university she can find—we’re talking big names, like Imperial College London. Study by study, each following rigorous research standards, Feilding is building a case for making LSD a standard weapon in the clinical fight against mental illness. It's a path, though, that's fraught with scientific pitfalls—researchers are just beginning to understand how the human brain works, much less the mechanisms behind psychedelics.

The fact that psychedelics ended up as pariah drugs “is an example, in a way, of man's madness,” she says, toying with the edges of her shawl. “There are these incredible compounds that synergize amazingly well with the human body and can be used to have incredibly positive results. And what do we do? We criminalize it.”

To change that, she won’t just have to upend decades of draconian drug policies. She’ll have to convince a public that has, for a half-century, been told that LSD is a great evil, a drug that makes people put flowers in their hair and jump out of windows. And Feilding will have to use science to convince policymakers that her hunch is right, that LSD and other psychedelics can be a force for good.

Which would be hard for anyone to pull off, but Feilding faces the extra hurdle of not being a classically trained scientist. “Immediately if you say you left school at 16 and self-educated thereafter, people don’t believe you can do anything,” she says. “It's a funny thing.”

Typical 12th-Century Stuff

Feilding is a descendant of the Hapsburg family, a dynasty that rose to great power in the 12th century. I ask her how—typical 12th-century stuff? “Typical 12th-century stuff,” she laughs. “Duffing over someone”—a Britishism for giving a beating—“and, funny enough, someone did a family tree and the number of people, I keep meaning to underline them and put a little red star on the ones who had their heads cut off. There was really quite a lot of people having their heads cut off.”

Feilding’s branch of the Hapsburg family tree wasn’t so much the let’s-rule-the-world-and-make-lots-of-money kind of royalty. More of a stick-it-to-the-man vibe. “One was going to be executed around the Gunpowder Plot, and then his wife went to visit him and they swapped clothes,” she says. “He got out the day before his execution. I mean, they were all rather nice antiestablishment personalities.”