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In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances, including cholesterol, bile acids, sex hormones, and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands—the steroids. The medicinal potential of various steroids quickly became obvious, but extracting sufficient quantities of these substances, which exist in minute amounts in animal tissue and fluids, was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products such as quinine or penicillin, chemists were called upon to mimic nature—to create the substances synthetically—and later to modify the natural molecule to make the substance safer and more effective as a drug. For steroids, chemists found starting materials in certain plant substances that were also steroids. Percy Julian (1899–1975) and Carl Djerassi (1923– ) participated actively in the synthesis of natural steroids and their large-scale production.

Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899—the son of a railway mail clerk and the grandson of slaves. In an era when African Americans faced prejudice in virtually all aspects of life—not least in the scientific world—he succeeded against the odds. He majored in chemistry at DePauw University, earning his way by digging ditches and by waiting on tables in a fraternity house. After graduation he worked at Fisk University for two years as a chemistry instructor. He then completed a master's degree in organic chemistry at Harvard University and returned to teaching at West Virginia State College. In 1929 Julian began his studies at the University of Vienna, focusing on the chemistry of medicinal plants, and earned his doctorate in 1931. He and a fellow doctorate, Josef Pikl (whom Julian had invited and assisted in coming to America), took positions at Howard University and two years later moved to Julian's alma mater, DePauw. There they accomplished the first total synthesis of the active principle of the Calabar bean—an alkaloid, physostigmine, used in the treatment of glaucoma.

Meanwhile German chemists were showing that the steroid stigmasterol—which Julian had obtained as a by-product of the physostigmine synthesis but was also obtainable from soybeans—could be used in the preparation of certain sex hormones. In 1936, in pursuit of this lead, Julian wrote to the Glidden Company in Chicago, requesting some sample soybean oil. Glidden's vice president, W. J. O'Brien, was also on the board of the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, where Julian had recently applied for a job as a research chemist. After O'Brien listened to his fellow board members bemoan the difficulty in hiring Julian because of a law forbidding Negroes to stay overnight in Appleton, O'Brien decided to offer Julian a job at Glidden. "If he is half as good as they say he is," said O'Brien, "I can use him at Glidden." Julian was promptly made Director of Research of the Glidden Soya Products Division, where he remained until 1953, when he left to found his own company, Julian Laboratories.

Julian and Djerassi were both involved in the exciting competition of the late 1940s and early 1950s to synthesize the hormone cortisone inexpensively. In 1949 Julian published a paper on a new synthesis for Reichstein's Substance S, which is also present in the adrenal cortex and differs from cortisone in lacking only one oxygen atom in a particular molecular position. Hydrocortisone is still widely produced from this substance.

Djerassi came to the United States in 1939, after fleeing from the Nazis in Austria. He sped through college, after which he spent a brief period working on antihistamines for the Swiss pharmaceutical company CIBA at their New Jersey facility. He then completed a doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, where he wrote his dissertation on how to transform the male sex hormone testosterone into the female sex hormone estradiol using a series of chemical reactions. Djerassi's longtime fascination with steroids prompted his return to CIBA, but he was not allowed to work on steroid synthesis there. That promising field of research was reserved for the laboratories at CIBA's corporate headquarters in Switzerland. Djerassi was disappointed, and in 1949—shortly after Julian's paper on Substance S appeared—he joined Laboratorios Syntex S.A. in Mexico City. The steroid chemist Russell Marker and a partner had founded the firm to produce synthetic hormones from steroidal substances in Mexican plants—the same reason that Julian founded Julian Laboratories. Syntex was trying to synthesize cortisone from diosgenin, a steroidal substance found in Mexican yams; the company had already produced male and female sex hormones from diosgenin. In 1951 Djerassi's group successfully synthesized cortisone, improving on the original procedure done in 1944 by Lewis Sarett of Merck: the Syntex process not only used a cheaper raw material but also required only about half as many steps.

In 1951, the same year that Djerassi's group synthesized cortisone, it also synthesized the first effective oral contraceptive. It had long been known that during pregnancy progesterone serves as a natural contraceptive by inhibiting further ovulation, while maintaining the proper uterine conditions for the fetus. But taking natural progesterone orally weakens its biological activity, and thus the search was on for a more active sex hormone that could survive digestive processes. A compound synthesized at Syntex proved to be one of the most potent oral progestins ever made. In 1957 the Food and Drug Administration approved Syntex's norethindrone, plus a related drug produced by G. D. Searle and Company, first as a treatment for menstrual difficulties and then as a birth-control pill.

Djerassi maintained a 20-year-long relationship with Syntex, while also accepting academic appointments after his 1951 triumphs, first at Wayne State University in Detroit and then at Stanford University. He made many more advances in synthetic organic chemistry and refined the techniques of mass spectroscopy and methods for deducing the precise orientation in space of the atoms in a molecule from optical rotatory dispersion (ORD).

Both Julian and Djerassi placed a high priority on their contributions to society as scientists and citizens. Julian was particularly active in groups seeking to advance conditions for African Americans, helping to found the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of Chicago as well as serving on the boards of several other organizations and universities. He was always attempting to build bridges between diverse groups of people. Djerassi, in line with his work on the birth-control pill, seeks to raise consciousness about the global need for population control. Stemming from his years with Syntex have been his efforts to encourage science in developing countries like Mexico. In memory of his daughter, who was an artist, and consonant with his own artistic and literary interests, he has established a colony for artists near San Francisco, California.