It is nearly impossible to do good science this way anymore: the old way-the way of Priestly, or Newton. He used his own resources-supporting his work via lecturing and consulting-and did his chemical syntheses in a small laboratory he constructed behind his home. For the most part Sasha worked alone, or with a very small number of close friends and colleagues. He published the results of his investigations in scientific journals-several hundred chemically unique compounds that had never before been synthesized and investigated, or even imagined.
Taking the chemical structure of mescaline as his starting point, he made, over a period of years, numerous molecular modifications, and very carefully tested the effects of each one, using himself as research subject. Sasha Shulgin at the workbench in his lab.īeing a chemist, Sasha was deeply intrigued by how a chemical could have such profound effects on one’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and decided that the study of how molecular structure relates to a chemical’s effects on body and mind was a topic deserving rigorous scientific investigation.
The majority of these were discovered through chemical synthesis and testing by one man: Sasha Shulgin. Today, in the early 21st century, there are well over a hundred chemicals known to have psychedelic effects, some say over 200. By 1960, when Sasha experienced its effects, there were but a handful of additional psychedelic chemicals known: LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) had been characterized by Albert Hofmann in 1943 psilocybin and psilocin were identified from Psilocybe mushrooms by Hofmann in 1958 lysergic acid amide had been identified, again by Hofmann, from the seeds of morning glories, used for shamanic healing ceremonies in Mexico and DMT (dimethyltryptamine) had been characterized from several species of plants employed for their psychoactive effects by Amazonian shamans. Then, in April 1960, in his 35th year, Sasha experienced the powerful psychoactive effects of mescaline, stating later that: “It was a day that will remain blazingly vivid in my memory, and one which unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life.” (PiHKAL, Chapter 2)Ī century ago, mescaline was the only chemical substance known to science that today would unequivocally be called a psychedelic. He also began to read pretty much everything that had been written about mescaline, and became increasingly intrigued with the seemingly magical properties of this molecule that had been identified from the peyote cactus in 1897 by German pharmacologist Arthur Heffter. While at Dow he synthesized a carbamate derivative that was marketed as an insecticide (mexacarbate, brand name Zectran ®). The majority of these were discovered through chemical synthesis and testing by one man: Sasha Shulgin.įollowing his Ph.D., Sasha pursued the study of pharmacology at UC San Francisco, and worked for more than a decade in industry, first at Bio-Rad Laboratories and then at Dow Chemical. Today there are well over a hundred chemicals known to have psychedelic effects, some say over 200. To Sasha, molecules had personalities, and he related to their structures and properties with an intimacy that is reflected, for example, in his calling molecular-structure diagrams “dirty pictures.” No doubt Sasha’s intuitions about molecular structure and chemical syntheses grew immensely during this period, and he was set on his way to becoming the artistic genius of pharmaceutical chemistry that he was to be. The primary goal of doctoral research in science is generally not to accomplish one’s best and most creative work, but to muck around and build intuition in the subject area. Isotopically labeled molecules like these are useful for investigating details of metabolic pathways, how the body manufactures this from that.Īlthough Sasha later wrote that his doctoral work was “uninspired” and “dull” (PiHKAL, Chapter 2), adjectives like these are commonly applied to graduate-school projects. Sasha’s doctoral research in biochemistry at UC Berkeley developed methods for the synthesis of amino acids containing chemical isotopes of carbon and nitrogen. Navy during World War II, he lived his entire life either in Berkeley or nearby in the East Bay. Except for some time spent as an undergraduate at Harvard and a stint in the U.S. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin was born in Berkeley on June 17, 1925, and received his bachelor’s (1949) and doctorate (1955) degrees from the local college, the University of California in Berkeley.
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