Carl Djerassi facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Carl Djerassi
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Carl Djerassi in 2004
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| Born | October 29, 1923 Vienna, Austria
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| Died | January 30, 2015 (aged 91) San Francisco, California, United States
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| Children | 2 |
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| Fields | Chemistry |
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Carl Djerassi (October 29, 1923 – January 30, 2015) was an Austrian-born Bulgarian-American pharmaceutical chemist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of Djerassi Resident Artists Program with Diane Wood Middlebrook.
Early life
Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna, Austria, but spent the first years of his infancy in Sofia, Bulgaria, the home of his father, Samuel Djerassi, a dermatologist. 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 realgymnasium 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.
Education
Djerassi started his college career at Newark Junior College after moving to the United States with his mother when he was 16. He previously had 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.
Career
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 has 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. From 1952 to 1959 he was professor of chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Djerassi 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.
In 1957, he became vice president of research at Syntex in Mexico City while on leave of absence from Wayne State. In 1960 Djerassi 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 Woodside, 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 over 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.
Awards and honors
Djerassi won numerous awards during his career including:
- Ernest Guenther Award in Chemistry and Natural Products by the American Chemical Society (1960)
- Scheele Award (1972)
- National Medal of Science (President of the United States of America, 1973)
- Perkin Medal (1975)
- Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1978)
- First recipient of the Wolf Prize, 1978
- National Medal of Technology (President of the United States of America, 1991) for "his broad technological contributions to solving environmental problems; and for his initiatives in developing novel, practical approaches to insect control products that are biodegradable and harmless"
- Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1980)
- Priestley Medal (American Chemical Society, 1992)
- Willard Gibbs Award (Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society., 1997)
- Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class (1999)
- Othmer Gold Medal (2000)
- Prize of the German Chemical Society for Writers (2001)
- Grand Gold Medal for services to the province of Lower Austria (2002)
- Gold Medal of the capital Vienna (2002)
- Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2003)
- Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea (2003)
- American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal (2004)
- Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (2005)
- Premio letterario Serono in Rome (2005)
- An Austrian postage stamp with Djerassi's portrait, issued to mark his 80th birthday (2005) The Austrian government also sent him a new Austrian passport.
- Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria (2008)
- Honorary doctorate from the faculty of humanities of the Technical University of Dortmund for his literary work (as 21 honorary doctorate) (2009)
- Alecrin Prize (2009, Vigo, Spain)
- Djerassi Glacier on Brabant Island in Antarctica is named after Carl Djerassi (2009).
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2010)
- Edinburgh Medal (2011)
- Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences, Heidelberg University (2011)
- Honorary doctorate from the Porto University (2011)
- Honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna (2012)
- Honorary doctorate from the Medical University of Vienna (2012)
- Honorary doctorate from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2013)
- Honorary doctorate from the Sigmund Freud University, Vienna (2013)
- Honorary doctorate from the American University in Bulgaria (2013)
- Honorary doctorate from the University of Innsbruck (2014)
An award that eluded Djerassi was the Nobel Prize, where he is considered one of the more notable "snubs" by the Nobel Committee.
Personal life
Djerassi described himself as a "Jewish atheist".
Djerassi was married three times and had two children. He and Virginia Jeremiah were married in 1943 and divorced in 1950. Djerassi married writer Norma Lundholm (1917–2006) later that year. They had two children together, and were divorced in 1976. One year after his second divorce, Djerassi began a relationship with Diane Middlebrook, a Stanford University professor of English and biographer. In 1985, they were married and they lived between San Francisco and London, until her death on December 15, 2007, due to cancer.
Djerassi died on January 30, 2015, at the age of 91 from complications of liver and bone cancer. Upon his death Carl Djerassi was survived by his son and grandson.
See also
In Spanish: Carl Djerassi para niños
