Mon, Feb 02, 2015 page7

• ‘Father’ of contraceptive pill Carl Djerassi dies at 91

  • NY Times News Service
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  Carl Djerassi, an eminent chemist who 63 years ago synthesized a hormone that changed the world by creating the key ingredient for the oral contraceptive known as “the pill,” died at his home in San Francisco on Friday last week. He was 91.

  His son, Dale, said the cause was complications of liver and bone cancer.

  Djerassi arrived in the US as World War II engulfed Europe, a 16-year-old Austrian Jewish refugee who, with his mother, lost their last US$20 to a swindling New York cabdriver. He wrote to then-US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for assistance, and obtained a college scholarship. It was a little help that made a big difference.

  

  Chemist, novelist and playwright Carl Djerassi talks during a news conference in Vienna, Austria, on Nov. 11, 2008.

  Photo: Reuters

  Djerassi wrote books, plays and 1,200 scientific articles; taught at universities for five decades; created an artists’ colony in California; and obtained a patent on the first antihistamine.

  His work on the science of birth control helped engender enormous controversies and social changes, altering sexual and reproductive practices, family economics and the working lives of millions of women around the world.

  While never a household name, Djerassi was often called the father of the pill. However, it was something of an exaggeration. He did not invent the commercial birth-control pill, and was only one of many scientists working over decades who pioneered the chemical bases of what would become the pill.

  And even on the day of the breakthrough, he was one of two chemists working with a student assistant at a small pharmaceutical laboratory in Mexico City who first synthesized a progestin called norethindrone, which became the key ingredient of the pill. It was on Oct. 15, 1951 — one of those dates recorded for posterity — a year before others created similar compounds in other labs.

  Scientists had long known that high levels of estrogen and progesterone inhibited ovulation, but synthesizing them from animal or plant extracts had proved expensive and ineffective for use as oral contraceptives.

  The synthesis by Djerassi and his colleagues, George Rosenkranz and the student, Luis Miramontes, was both economical and effective for oral use. All three names went on the patent.

  At first, the team deemed it a breakthrough for fertility, not birth control. While its significance as a pregnancy inhibitor was soon recognized, five years of trials were needed to demonstrate its relative safety and effectiveness. Even then, drug companies were reluctant to market the pill, fearing boycotts of their products by religious groups and others opposed to birth control.

  In the 1960s, however, the pill — based also on pioneering work by M.C. Chang, Gregory Pincus, John Rock and others, and technically known as the combined oral contraceptive pill — was developed and marketed by various drug companies.

  Use of the pill spread rapidly, producing vast economic and social effects. It gave women unprecedented control over fertility, separating sex from procreation. It let couples plan pregnancies and regulate family size, and women plan educations and careers. It also generated debates over promiscuity and the morality of birth control. The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, emphasized its bans on artificial contraception.

  The pill made Djerassi wealthy and something of a celebrity as he moved through a series of careers as a professor of chemistry, an insect-control entrepreneur, an art collector, a rancher, an author of science novels and nonfiction books as well as a poet, playwright and founder of an artists’ colony.

  “Yes, I am proud to be called the father of the pill,” he told Nicholas Wroe of the Guardian newspaper in 2000. “But identifying scientists is really only a surrogate for identifying the inventions or discoveries. Maybe it is true that Shakespeare’s plays would never have been written if it wasn’t for Shakespeare. But I’m certain that if we didn’t do our work, then someone else would have come along shortly afterwards and done it.”

  Djerassi was born in Vienna on Oct. 29, 1923, to Samuel and Alice Friedmann Djerassi. His parents were physicians who divorced when he was six.

  In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and 70,000 Austrian Jews and communists were quickly rounded up, the elder Djerassi returned to Vienna and remarried his wife in order to take her and Carl out of the country. The marriage was soon annulled, and Carl and his mother made their way to the US in 1939, settling in upstate New York, where his mother worked in a group medical practice. His father emigrated to the US in 1949.

  With a scholarship arranged through Roosevelt’s intercession, Carl briefly attended Tarkio College in Missouri, then earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in chemistry at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1942, when he was not quite 19. In 1945, he earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin and became a naturalized US citizen.

  Married three times, Djerassi is survived by his son, a grandson and a stepdaughter.
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