Alexander Shulgin

Alexander Shulgin

Alexander Theodore "Sasha" Shulgin (June 17, 1925 – June 2, 2014) was an American medicinal chemist, biochemist, organic chemist, pharmacologist, psychopharmacologist, and author. He is credited with introducing MDMA, commonly known as "ecstasy", via academic journals and papers to psychologists in the late 1970s for psychopharmaceutical use and for the discovery, synthesis and personal bioassay of over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential.In 1991 and 1997, he and his wife Ann Shulgin compiled the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL (standing for Phenethylamines and Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved), from notebooks that extensively described their work and personal experiences with these two classes of psychoactive drugs. Shulgin performed seminal work into the descriptive synthesis of many of these compounds. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Alexander Shulgin has received more than 1,713,606 page views. His biography is available in 24 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 23 in 2019). Alexander Shulgin is the 276th most popular chemist (up from 290th in 2019), the 1,943rd most popular biography from United States (up from 2,096th in 2019) and the 58th most popular American Chemist.