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 a famous chemist, writer, and playwright. He was born in Austria but also had Bulgarian and American citizenship. Carl Djerassi helped create the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, which supports artists.
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Carl Djerassi's Early Life and Escape
Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923. He spent his first few years in Sofia, Bulgaria, where his father, Samuel Djerassi, was a skin doctor. His mother, Alice Friedmann, was a dentist and doctor from Vienna. Both of his parents were Jewish.
After his parents divorced, Carl and his mother moved back to Vienna. He went to the same school that Sigmund Freud had attended many years before. Carl spent his summers in Bulgaria with his father.
When Carl was 14, Austria would not give him citizenship. In 1938, after the Anschluss (when Nazi Germany took over Austria), his father briefly remarried his mother. This helped Carl and his mother escape the Nazi regime. They fled to Sofia, Bulgaria, and Carl lived there with his father for a year.
Bulgaria was a safe place for Jewish people during this time. The country managed to protect its entire Jewish population from being sent to Nazi concentration camps. While in Sofia, Carl went to the American College of Sofia. There, he learned to speak English very well.
In December 1939, Carl and his mother arrived in the United States with very little money. Carl's mother worked as a doctor in New York. Later, in 1949, his father also moved to the United States. He practiced medicine and eventually retired near Carl in San Francisco.
Carl Djerassi's Education Journey
Carl Djerassi started college at Newark Junior College when he was 16. He had already attended the American College of Sofia, where he became fluent in English. Because of the name of his high school, he was mistakenly enrolled in college before he had officially graduated high school.
After a year, Carl wrote a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. He asked for help with money for college. He received a full scholarship to Tarkio College. He briefly attended there before studying chemistry at Kenyon College, where he graduated with top honors.
After working for one year at a company called CIBA, he went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned his PhD in organic chemistry in 1945. For his PhD, he studied how to change certain important body chemicals from one form to another.
Carl Djerassi's Career and Discoveries
From 1942 to 1943, Carl Djerassi worked for CIBA in New Jersey. There, he helped develop Pyribenzamine, which was one of the first medicines to treat allergies. This was his first patent.
In 1949, Djerassi became a research leader at Syntex in Mexico City. He stayed there until 1951. He chose Syntex partly because they had a special machine called a DU spectrophotometer. His team worked on making a new version of cortisone, a medicine, from a Mexican wild yam plant.
In 1951, Carl Djerassi, along with Luis E. Miramontes and George Rosenkranz, helped invent norethisterone. This was a very important discovery. Unlike other similar substances, norethisterone worked well when taken by mouth and was much stronger than natural body chemicals.
From 1952 to 1959, Djerassi was a chemistry professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1957, he also became the vice president of research at Syntex in Mexico City.
In 1960, Djerassi became a chemistry professor at Stanford University. He held this position until 2002, but he always worked part-time because he also stayed involved in the industry. From 1968 to 1972, he was also the president of Syntex Research in Palo Alto.
His work with Syntex made Carl Djerassi very wealthy. He bought a large area of land in Woodside, California, and started a cattle ranch called SMIP. This name was an acronym for "Syntex Made It Possible." He also collected a lot of art. His collection of works by Paul Klee was one of the most important private collections. He arranged for his Klee art to be given to museums in Vienna and San Francisco after he passed away.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Djerassi continued his important scientific work at Stanford University. He also worked as an entrepreneur. He developed new ways to study chemicals using techniques like mass spectrometry. He focused on hormones and other natural compounds, and he wrote over 1,200 scientific papers. His interests were very broad, including new instruments, medicines, insect control, and using artificial intelligence in medical research.
In 1968, he started a new company called Zoecon. This company focused on environmentally friendly ways to control pests. They used special insect hormones to stop insects from growing into their adult stages. Zoecon was later bought by other companies. Part of Zoecon still exists today, making products to control fleas and other pests.
In 1965, at Stanford University, Carl Djerassi worked with Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg and computer scientist Edward Feigenbaum. They created a computer program called DENDRAL. This program helped figure out the structure of unknown chemical compounds. It was one of the first times artificial intelligence was used in medical research.
Carl Djerassi was also a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Awards and Honors for Carl Djerassi
Carl Djerassi received many awards during his career, including:
- Ernest Guenther Award in Chemistry and Natural Products (1960)
- Scheele Award (1972)
- National Medal of Science from the President of the United States (1973)
- Perkin Medal (1975)
- Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1978)
- First person to receive the Wolf Prize (1978)
- National Medal of Technology from the President of the United States (1991) for his work on solving environmental problems and developing safe insect control products.
- Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1980)
- Priestley Medal (1992)
- Willard Gibbs Award (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 Lower Austria (2002)
- Gold Medal of 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 (2005)
- Premio letterario Serono (2005)
- An Austrian postage stamp with his picture was issued for his 80th birthday (2005).
- Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria (2008)
- Honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Dortmund for his writing (2009)
- Alecrin Prize (2009)
- Djerassi Glacier in Antarctica was named after him (2009).
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2010)
- Edinburgh Medal (2011)
- Many honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Heidelberg University (2011), Porto University (2011), University of Vienna (2012), Medical University of Vienna (2012), University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2013), Sigmund Freud University (2013), American University in Bulgaria (2013), and University of Innsbruck (2014).
Even with all these awards, Carl Djerassi never won the Nobel Prize. Many people believe he should have received one.
Carl Djerassi's Personal Life
Carl Djerassi said he was a "Jewish atheist." This means he was from a Jewish family but did not believe in God.
He was married three times and had two children. He married Virginia Jeremiah in 1943, and they divorced in 1950. Later that year, he married writer Norma Lundholm. They had two children together and divorced in 1976.
A year after his second divorce, Carl Djerassi started a relationship with Diane Middlebrook. She was a professor at Stanford University and a writer. They married in 1985 and lived between San Francisco and London. Diane passed away in 2007 from cancer.
Carl Djerassi died on January 30, 2015, when he was 91 years old. He passed away due to complications from liver and bone cancer. He was survived by his son and grandson.
See also
In Spanish: Carl Djerassi para niños
