Carl Djerassi

Carl Djerassi led the team that synthesised the first orally active contraceptive steroid, and spent his later life as a novelist and playwright. Born in Vienna in 1923 to two physicians, he was Jewish and left after the Anschluss in 1938, first to Bulgaria and then to the United States at sixteen with his mother and almost no money. He wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking for help with college fees and was directed to a scholarship. He took a doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in three years, worked at Ciba on antihistamines, and in 1949 joined Syntex in Mexico City, a company built on the discovery that a Mexican yam, barbasco, contained diosgenin, a cheap steroid precursor. At Syntex he first synthesised cortisone from plant material rather than animal bile, which made the anti-inflammatory drug affordable. Then, on 15 October 1951, his team including Luis Miramontes and George Rosenkranz produced norethindrone — a progestin modified by removing a carbon at the nineteenth position and adding an ethinyl group, which made it survive digestion and work when swallowed. The chemistry was theirs; the clinical development and advocacy that turned it into the pill came from Gregory Pincus, John Rock and Margaret Sanger, and Djerassi was always careful about the distinction, calling himself the mother rather than the father of the pill. He held professorships at Stanford for decades, pioneered mass spectrometry of organic compounds and computer applications in chemistry, and worked on insect control as an alternative to pesticides. After his daughter Pamela's suicide in 1978 he founded an artists' colony on his California ranch. He wrote novels and plays about scientific conduct, and died in 2015.

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