Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveSynthetic chemistry biography

In 1935 American chemist Percy Julian and his colleague Josef Pikl became the first to make the glaucoma drug physostigmine from simple chemicals. Julian later found ways to extract sterols, the raw material for many hormones, from soybeans on a factory scale, making drugs such as progesterone and cortisone far cheaper.

Percy Lavon Julian

BiographyScienceHealthBusiness

The story behind the card

Physostigmine came from the Calabar bean of West Africa and was scarce. Julian's synthesis at DePauw University in Indiana also showed that a rival synthesis by the eminent British chemist Robert Robinson had gone wrong. Despite this, DePauw refused him a professorship because he was Black, and in 1936 he moved to industry as director of research at the Glidden paint company in Chicago. There, water once leaked into a tank of purified soybean oil and turned it into a solid mass. Julian recognised that it was rich in sterols, plant compounds with the same basic structure as human hormones, and turned the accident into a factory process. It made progesterone and later cortisone much cheaper. Julian held more than 130 patents, and in 1973 he became the first African-American chemist elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

Türkçe oku
Amerikalı kimyager Percy Julian, 1935'te çalışma arkadaşı Josef Pikl ile birlikte göz tansiyonu ilacı fizostigmini basit kimyasallardan ilk kez üretti. Daha sonra birçok hormonun hammaddesi olan sterolleri soya fasulyesinden fabrika ölçeğinde elde etmenin yolunu buldu; progesteron ve kortizon gibi ilaçlar böylece çok ucuzladı.

Fizostigmin, Batı Afrika'daki Calabar fasulyesinden elde edilen kıt bir maddeydi. Julian'ın Indiana'daki DePauw Üniversitesi'nde yaptığı sentez, ünlü İngiliz kimyager Robert Robinson'ın aynı madde için yayımladığı sentezin hatalı olduğunu da gösterdi. Bu başarıya rağmen DePauw, siyahi olduğu için ona profesörlük vermedi. Julian 1936'da Chicago'daki Glidden boya şirketine araştırma direktörü olarak geçti. Orada bir gün arıtılmış soya yağıyla dolu bir tanka su sızdı ve yağ katı bir kütleye dönüştü. Julian bu kütlenin, insan hormonlarıyla aynı temel yapıyı taşıyan bitkisel bileşikler olan sterollerce zengin olduğunu fark etti ve kazayı bir fabrika yöntemine çevirdi. Böylece progesteron, daha sonra da kortizon çok ucuzladı. 130'dan fazla patent alan Julian, 1973'te ABD Ulusal Bilimler Akademisi'ne seçilen ilk Afrikalı Amerikalı kimyager oldu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Percy Lavon Julian
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveHealth

Alice Ball, a 23-year-old chemist in Hawaii, found in 1915 how to turn chaulmoogra oil, a traditional remedy, into an injectable medicine for leprosy, also called Hansen's disease. Her method was the most effective treatment until the 1940s.

Oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree had long been used against leprosy in India and elsewhere in Asia, but it was hard to take: swallowed, it caused nausea, and injected, it formed painful blisters under the skin. Ball, the first woman and first Black American to earn a master's degree at the College of Hawaii, took up the problem at the request of the surgeon Harry Hollmann. She turned the oil's fatty acids into ethyl esters, a form that could be injected and absorbed by the body. She died in December 1916, aged 24, before she could publish. The college president, Arthur Dean, carried on the work without crediting her; Hollmann later published an account naming it the 'Ball method'. Dapsone and related drugs replaced it in the 1940s.

Alice BallRead card
DriveBiography

American cancer doctor Jane C. Wright tested chemotherapy drugs on tumour tissue grown in the laboratory and compared the results with how patients responded. Her work helped move chemotherapy from trial and error towards a more systematic science.

Born in New York in 1919, Wright joined her father, the surgeon Louis T. Wright, at Harlem Hospital's Cancer Research Foundation in 1949. Instead of relying on laboratory mice, they grew samples of patients' tumours and exposed them to candidate drugs, then checked whether the laboratory results matched what happened in the clinic. In 1951 she reported that the drug methotrexate could shrink some breast and skin cancers; it is still widely used. She also devised a way to deliver strong drugs through a catheter, a thin tube, to tumours deep in organs such as the liver and spleen, without surgery. In 1964 she was the only woman among the seven doctors who founded the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and in 1967 she became associate dean at New York Medical College. She died in 2013.

Jane C. WrightRead card
DriveBiography

American chemist Gertrude Elion shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George Hitchings and James Black. Elion and Hitchings designed drugs by studying how diseased cells and germs differ from healthy ones, instead of relying on trial and error.

Elion joined the drug company Burroughs Wellcome in New York State in 1944 as Hitchings's assistant. Their team built molecules that resemble the natural building blocks of DNA closely enough to jam the machinery of cancer cells, microbes or immune cells. The work produced 6-mercaptopurine for childhood leukaemia, azathioprine to stop the body rejecting transplanted organs, allopurinol for gout and acyclovir for herpes infections, and researchers trained in her methods later developed AZT, the first drug widely used against AIDS. Elion never finished a doctorate: after years of evening study she was told she would have to give up her job to continue full time, and she chose to keep working. Harvard and many other universities later gave her honorary degrees.

Gertrude B. ElionRead card
DriveBiography

Filipino paediatrician Fe del Mundo opened the Philippines' first children's hospital in Quezon City in 1957, paying for it by selling her house and taking out a large loan. She also took child healthcare out to the villages, designing a bamboo incubator for places without electricity.

Born in Manila in 1911, del Mundo qualified as a doctor at the University of the Philippines in 1933 and trained further in children's medicine at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. She came home in 1941, just before the Japanese occupation, and cared for children held in the Santo Tomas internment camp, where she became known as “the Angel of Santo Tomas”. Her Children's Medical Center opened in 1957. She sent teams into the countryside to teach breastfeeding and child care, pressed for village midwives to be brought into the health service, and wrote a Textbook of Pediatrics long used in Philippine medical schools. In 1980 she became the first woman named a National Scientist of the Philippines. She died in 2011, aged 99.

Fe del MundoRead card
DriveHealth

In 1952 the American anaesthetist Virginia Apgar devised the Apgar score, a quick way to rate a newborn's condition right after birth. Given at one and five minutes by checking colour, heart rate, reflexes, muscle tone and breathing, it became standard in delivery rooms worldwide.

Apgar trained as a surgeon at Columbia University in the 1930s, one of very few women to do so, but the head of surgery, Allen Whipple, steered her towards anaesthesia, then a young specialty. Working at births, she saw that no one systematically checked a newborn's condition. Her score rates each of five signs 0, 1 or 2, for a total of 0 to 10; most healthy babies score 7 or more, while a low score tells staff that a baby needs help at once. In 1962 colleagues turned her name into a memory aid: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration.

Virginia ApgarRead card
Next card in the archiveAmerican biologist Ernest Everett Just showed that an egg cell's surface changes rapidly at fertilisation and helps stop extra sperm from getting in. Working with sea urchins and other marine animals, he insisted that cells be studied in conditions as close to natural as possible.Read next →