Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, received a B.A. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After serving in the Navy, he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry (from Berkeley. In the late '50s and early '60s he did post-doctorate work in psychiatry and pharmacology at U.C. San Francisco. He worked at Dow Chemical Company.

In 1960, Shulgin tried mescaline for the first time. He then experimented with synthesizing chemicals with structures similar to mescaline such as DOM. After leaving Dow in 1965 to become an independent consultant, Shulgin taught public health at Berkeley and San Francisco General Hospital.

Since the '60s, Shulgin has synthesized and bioassayed (self-tested) hundreds of psychoactive chemicals, recording his work in four books and more than 200 papers. He is a fixture in the psychedelic community, speaking at conferences, granting frequent interviews, and instilling a sense of rational scientific thought into the world of self-experimentation and psychoactive ingestion.