Carl Djerassi (October 29, 1923 – January 30, 2015) was a Viennese-born Bulgarian-American pharmaceutical chemist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of Djerassi Resident Artists Program with Diane Wood Middlebrook. He is best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pills, nicknamed the "father of the pill".
Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna, Austria, and spent the first years of his infancy in Sofia, Bulgaria, the home of his father, Samuel Djerassi, a dermatologist and specialist in sexually transmitted diseases. His mother was Alice Friedmann, a Viennese dentist and physician. Both parents were Jewish.
Following his parents' divorce, Djerassi and his mother moved to Vienna. Until the age of 14, he attended the same grammar school that Sigmund Freud had attended many years earlier; spending summers in Bulgaria with his father.
Austria refused him citizenship and after the Anschluss, his father briefly remarried his mother in 1938 to allow Carl and his mother to escape the Nazi regime and flee to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he lived with his father for a year. Bulgaria, although not immune to antisemitism, proved a safe haven, as the country managed to save its entire 48,000-strong Jewish population from deportation to Nazi concentration camps. During his time in Sofia, Djerassi attended the American College of Sofia, where he became fluent in English.
In December 1939, Djerassi arrived with his mother in the United States, nearly penniless. Djerassi's mother worked in a group practice in upstate New York. In 1949, his father emigrated to the United States, practiced in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and eventually retired near his son in San Francisco, California.
Djerassi started his college career at Newark Junior College, after moving to the United States with his mother when he was 16. He had previously attended the American College of Sofia, a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he became fluent in English. Because of the name of his high school, he was misunderstood and enrolled into Newark Junior College before graduating high school. After a year at Newark Junior College, Djerassi wrote a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt asking for help with a room and board and tuition scholarship to a four-year college. He received a response from the Institute of International Education with a full scholarship to Tarkio College where he briefly attended, and then studied chemistry at Kenyon College, where he graduated summa cum laude. After one year at CIBA, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he earned his PhD in organic chemistry in 1945. His thesis work examined the transformation of the male sex hormone testosterone into the female sex hormone estradiol, through a sequence of chemical reactions.
In 1942/43, Djerassi worked for CIBA in New Jersey, developing Pyribenzamine (tripelennamine), his first patent and one of the first commercial antihistamines.
In 1949, Djerassi became associate director of research at Syntex in Mexico City and remained there through 1951. He said that one factor influencing him to choose Syntex was that they had a DU spectrophotometer. He worked on a new synthesis of cortisone based on diosgenin, a steroid sapogenin derived from a Mexican wild yam. His team later synthesized norethisterone (norethindrone), the first highly active progestin analogue that was effective when taken by mouth. This became part of one of the first successful combined oral contraceptive pills, known colloquially as the birth-control pill, or simply, the Pill. From 1952 to 1959, Djerassi was professor of chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit.
He participated in the invention in 1951, together with Mexican Luis E. Miramontes and Hungarian-Mexican George Rosenkranz, of the progestin norethisterone—which, unlike progesterone, remained effective when taken orally and was far stronger than the naturally occurring hormone. Djerassi's preparation was first administered as an oral contraceptive to animals by Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min Chueh Chang and to women by John Rock.
In 1957, Djerassi became vice president of research at Syntex in Mexico City while on leave of absence from Wayne State. In 1960, he became a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, a position he held until 2002 but only part-time, as he never left industry. From 1968 until 1972, he also served as president of Syntex Research at Palo Alto.
The Syntex connection brought wealth to Djerassi. He bought a large tract of land in San Mateo County, California, and started a cattle ranch called SMIP. (Initially an acronym for "Syntex Made It Possible", other variants have been suggested since.) He also assembled a large art collection. His collection of works by Paul Klee was considered to be one of the most significant to be privately held. He arranged for his Klee collections to be donated to the Albertina in Vienna and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, effective on his death.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Djerassi continued to do significant scientific work, as a professor in the department of chemistry at Stanford University, and as an entrepreneur. He pioneered novel physical research techniques for mass spectrometry and optical rotatory dispersion and applied them to the areas of organic chemistry and the life sciences. Focusing on the steroid hormones and alkaloids, he elucidated the structure of steroids, an area in which he published more than 1,200 papers. His scientific interests were wide-ranging, and his technological achievements include work in instrumentation, pharmaceuticals, insect control, the application of artificial intelligence in biomedical research, and the biology and chemistry of marine organisms.
In 1968, he started a new company, Zoecon, which focused on environmentally soft methods of pest control, using modified insect growth hormones to stop insects from metamorphosing from the larval stage to the pupal and adult stages. Zoecon was eventually acquired by Occidental Petroleum, which later sold it to Sandoz, now Novartis. Part of Zoecon survives in Dallas, Texas, making products to control fleas and other pests.
In 1965 at Stanford University, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg, computer scientist Edward Feigenbaum, and Djerassi devised the computer program DENDRAL (dendritic algorithm) for the elucidation of the molecular structure of unknown organic compounds taken from known groups of such compounds, such as the alkaloids and the steroids. This was a prototype for expert systems and one of the first uses of artificial intelligence in biomedical research.
Djerassi was a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was chairman of the Pharmanex Scientific Advisory Board.
Djerassi published widely as a novelist, playwright and scientist. In 1985, he said: "I feel like I'd like to lead one more life. I'd like to leave a cultural imprint on society rather than just a technological benefit."
He went on to write several novels in the "science-in-fiction" genre, including Cantor's Dilemma, in which he explored the ethics of modern scientific research through his protagonist, Dr. Cantor. He also wrote four autobiographies, the most recent of which, In Retrospect appeared in 2014. He wrote a number of plays, which have been performed and extensively translated. His book Chemistry in Theatre: Insufficiency, Phallacy or Both discusses the potential pedagogic value of using dialogic style and the plot structure of plays with special focus on chemistry.
Djerassi wrote five novels, four of which he described as "science-in-fiction", fiction that portrays the lives of real scientists, with all their accomplishments, conflicts, and aspirations. The genre is also referred to as Lab lit.