Silicon Valley entrepreneur lost her health and personality due to pituitary damage, and reconstructed it with careful endocrinology.

Wow.

"Without the ability to fine-tune my hormones and neurochemicals I believe I would have been trapped as a near-imbecile, wheelchair-bound, in my mother’s basement for an abbreviated and miserable adult life.

But with this ability I have reached the top of my field. Still, the health care system hinders my access to the chemicals I need to live. I am far from alone in this situation. It’s time we changed the system."

Agreed, it is time we changed the system. More people need to be able to experiment with this.

Btw, even the opening paragraph is eye opening:

IN my early 30s, for a few months, I altered my body chemistry and hormones so that I was closer to a man in his early 20s. I was blown away by how dramatically my thoughts changed. I was angry almost all the time, thought about sex constantly, and assumed I was the smartest person in the entire world. Over the years I had met guys rather like this.

How much of our lives are due to our chemistry?

creative and delicious meat machines?

And since they are machines, they can be modified.

Our entire physical lives are due to chemistry... internal and environmental.  

And our physical lives impose upon us the narratives we use to imagine ourselves as unique or in shared frames of awareness.

The more interesting part is that we can become aware of this and choose different internal and environmental chemistries...

If one were inclined to play with one's chemistry, where would one go to experiment?

To play with one's own chemistry?  Adam, that's your body... so where would you go to play with your body? Ahem.  Of course that gets personal in a hurry, so let's just start playing with the known body inputs that are universal chemistry to us all:

1. air

2. water

3. food.  

Simply experimenting with your breath, fasting on pure water and moderating your food (by variety, pacing and intake volume) is plenty enough to not only get one's chemistry lab going and fully stocked, but to get most of us to highly desirable finish lines of where and how we want to be living all the time.

If only...