Carl Djerassi obituary (original) (raw)

Carl Djerassi, who has died aged 91, was known as the father of the birth control pill. He was also one of the most productive chemists of his time – a developer of antihistamines, a founder of biomedical companies, a teacher of world-class chemists and a novelist.

Although producing the first synthesis of an oral contraceptive pill in 1951 was not his only accomplishment, for many it was his greatest achievement – an event now seen as one of the key episodes in 20th century social, as well as biomedical, history. Djerassi was honoured globally for his work, which changed the lives of many women and their families and altered the nature of human reproduction in ways that could not be foreseen at the time.

In his book This Man’s Pill, published on the 50th anniversary of that 1951 discovery, Djerassi saw the development of the pill as an outcome of postwar technological euphoria and was convinced that it could not have happened in today’s climate. He was equally certain that without the pill there would have been no sexual revolution in the 1960s, and doubted that the impending separation of sexual behaviour and activity into “sex for recreation and pleasure” and “sex for procreation” would have happened.

As with many scientific discoveries, the initial research that led to the pill was focused on something entirely different. Working with a small team in Mexico City for the pharmaceutical company Syntex, Djerassi – still in his 20s – was using locally grown yams to produce cortisone in the search for a wonder drug for arthritis. At that time production of cortisone depended on slaughterhouse animals for supply, so was expensive and difficult to build from scratch. Djerassi decided to go for partial synthesis using diosgenin, found in Mexico’s wild inedible yams, as starting material. It turned out that diosgenin can also be used to prepare progestogen – the synthetic version of the female sex hormone.

When Djerassi accomplished the first synthesis of a steroidal oral contraceptive in October 1951 he sent the substance to a number of endocrinologists, including Gregory Pincus. Two years later Pincus discovered that it worked in animals; in 1954 the Harvard gynaecologist John Rock and his colleagues carried out a small-scale study that demonstrated it was effective in humans – a fact confirmed by Pincus’s major human trial mounted in Puerto Rico in 1956.

The US Food and Drug Administration authorised marketing of the steroids for limited use in 1957 and three years later licensed Enovid, the first birth-control pill. Djerassi should, by right, have shared his title of “father of the pill” with Rock and Pincus, but rather like Neil Armstrong and the moon it was his name, and his alone, that stuck in the minds of most people.

Carl Djerassi interviewed by Roger Kornberg, also of Stanford University, 2011

Djerassi was born in Vienna, the son of Samuel Djerassi, a dermatologist and sexual health specialist, and Alice Friedmann, a dentist and physician. He and his mother were two of the many Jews who escaped from the city as the Nazis arrived in 1938, ending up in the US the following year. His father did not make the journey until 1949. In America, the young Djerassi was educated at Kenyon College in Ohio, and received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1945. After four years with the Ciba pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, he joined Syntex in Mexico as associate director of medical research.

Following his breakthrough with the pill at Syntex, he became a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1952 and then in 1959 began his long tenure as professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California. While there he continued with various outside posts and interests, becoming president of Syntex Research and in 1968 founding Zoecon, a company dedicated to finding environmentally aware approaches to insect control. What tended to be lost behind his most spectacular achievement with the pill was the breadth and variety of the rest of Djerassi’s work. He described this as being due to his having “always displayed a tendency for intellectual bigamy, indeed polygamy”.

In all he published more than 1,200 articles and seven monographs dealing with the chemistry of natural products, the applications of physical measurements, computer artificial intelligence techniques and organic chemical problems. In medical chemistry, as well as the field of oral contraceptives, he contributed pioneering work in antihistamines and topical corticosteroids, commonly used for the treatment of allergies and inflammation.

Djerassi was one of the few American scientists to have been awarded both his country’s National Medal of Science (for his work on the pill) and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (for promoting new approaches to insect control). In 1992 he was given the Priestley Medal, America’s highest award in chemistry, and his work was also recognised with 18 honorary doctorates as well as honorary membership of scientific organisations all over the world.

Unlike many scientific greats, Djerassi did not hide behind his laboratory door and express himself only through his science. He was hardly a shrinking violet, and acknowledged that “my working style for decades was rather different from that of the majority of my scientific peers”. He was clear-eyed and justifiably self-congratulatory about his role in the creation of the pill and its historical importance, admitting that it “caused me to become progressively more occupied with the social ramifications of such scientific inquiry”.

His interests outside his scientific career (skiing, modern art, opera and theatre) were wide, and in the 1990s he also turned to fiction writing. This was mostly in the genre of what he called “science-in-fiction”, where he used realistic fiction to illustrate the human side of scientists and the personal conflicts and moral dilemmas they could face in their work. His novels often worked better as discussion triggers rather than drama, which is what he intended anyway. He also published numerous poems and short stories in literary magazines, and extended his writings into the theatre. Plays such as An Immaculate Misconception, Four Jews on Parnassus and Oxygen have been performed around the world and translated into many languages.

Under the auspices of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program he founded an artists’ colony in Woodside, California, that has provided residencies and studio space for more than 2,000 artists since it began.

In the preface to his 1992 autobiography, Djerassi argued that “scientists are not necessarily narrow specialists, communicating in an incomprehensible language and dealing in the cloistered ambience of their laboratories with subjects far removed from everyday concerns”. Instead, he argued, “they can be as widely curious, and as self-centeredly imperfect, as scholars and thinkers in any intellectual endeavour and, at the same time, involve themselves with burning social issues”.

He was himself, of all people, never the narrow specialist. Always involved with what he did and with its impact on society, he was one of he most imaginative figures of 20th century science.

His first marriage, to Virginia Jeremiah, ended in divorce in 1950, and later that year he married Norma Lundholm. With Norma he had a son, Dale, and a daughter, Pamela, who died in 1978. After a second divorce he married Diane Middlebrook, who died in 2007. Besides Dale, he is survived by a grandson, Alexander, and a stepdaughter, Leah, from his third marriage.