Carl Djerassi helped create the first oral contraceptive

Person: Carl Djerassi
Lived: 1923–2015
Field: Chemistry
From: Austrian-American

The story

Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, both doctors. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, his father briefly remarried his mother so that she and Carl could escape to Sofia, Bulgaria, and in December 1939 mother and son arrived in the United States nearly penniless. He studied chemistry, worked on one of the first commercial antihistamines at CIBA in New Jersey, and earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin with a thesis on converting a male sex hormone into a female one.

In 1949 he became associate director of research at Syntex, a small company in Mexico City that made steroid hormones from a substance found in a wild Mexican yam. It had long been known that progesterone acts as a natural contraceptive during pregnancy by preventing further ovulation, but the hormone loses most of its power when swallowed. In 1951 Djerassi, the young Mexican chemist Luis Miramontes and George Rosenkranz synthesised norethisterone, also called norethindrone. It stayed effective when taken by mouth and was about 20 times more potent as a progestogen than ethisterone, the compound it was derived from. It was the first highly active oral progestin.

Djerassi's compound was first tested as a contraceptive in animals by Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang and in women by the physician John Rock. The US Food and Drug Administration approved norethindrone and a closely related Searle compound, norethynodrel, first for menstrual disorders in 1957 and then, in 1960, as oral contraceptives. Norethisterone went on to become part of one of the first successful combined birth-control pills, and in 1973 Djerassi received the National Medal of Science for the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive. His patent was later recognised with induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Norethisterone is still marketed throughout the world, both in combined pills and in progestogen-only mini pills, and it is also used to treat conditions such as endometriosis. Djerassi, often called the father of the Pill, went on to a long career at Stanford, wrote widely about population and the place of science in society, and later turned to fiction and plays.

Few laboratory discoveries have changed everyday life so directly. The molecule made in a small Mexico City laboratory gave women a reliable way to decide when to have children.

Why it matters

The compound Djerassi helped create gave millions of women a safe, reliable way to plan their families, reshaping health, education and work for generations.