Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin: The Chemist
Alexander Theodore Shulgin was born on June 17, 1925, in Berkeley, California, to Russian immigrant parents. A prodigy, he won a full scholarship to Harvard at age 16 but left at 18 to join the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he completed his PhD in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1954, followed by postdoctoral work in psychiatry and pharmacology at UCSF.
In the late 1950s, Shulgin joined Dow Chemical Company, where he quickly distinguished himself by inventing mexacarbate (Zectran), one of the first biodegradable insecticides. The commercial success of Zectran earned Shulgin unusual freedom at Dow -- essentially a license to pursue his own research interests. His attention turned to psychopharmacology. After his first mescaline experience in 1960, which he described as showing him that "everything I had learned or knew about the brain and the mind was based on the assumption that the mind is a product of the brain, and here was a single molecule that changed the mind," he dedicated himself to the chemistry of consciousness.
In 1966, Shulgin left Dow to work full-time from a small laboratory behind his home at 1483 Shulgin Road (the street was later named for his family) in Lafayette, California. He obtained a DEA Schedule I research license, which legally permitted him to synthesize and possess controlled substances for analytical purposes. For the next three decades, this modest lab -- equipped with a fume hood, a rotary evaporator, and shelves of reagent bottles -- became the most productive psychedelic chemistry laboratory in the world.
