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. He is best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pills, nicknamed the "father of the pill".

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 and specialist in sexually transmitted diseases. His mother was Alice Friedmann, a Viennese dentist and physician. Both parents were Jewish. spending summers in Bulgaria with his father. After one year at CIBA, he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he earned his PhD in organic chemistry in 1945.

Career

In 1942/43, Djerassi worked for CIBA in New Jersey, developing Pyribenzamine 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.

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, but only part-time, as he never left industry. 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. 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. and was chairman of the Pharmanex Scientific Advisory Board.

Publications

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,

Science-in-fiction

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.

In his first two novels, Cantor's Dilemma and Bourbaki Gambit, he shows how scientists work and think. In Cantor's Dilemma, there is the suspicion of scientific fraud; in Bourbaki Gambit the question of personal achievement stands in the center. In the third, Menachem's Seed, ICSI and the Pugwash organization are the main themes. In the last, NO, Djerassi shows how young scientists develop an idea as far as founding a company to market a product – something he himself did in the field of insecticides.

The topic of Djerassi's fifth novel, Marx Deceased, is the role of a writer's earlier bestsellers for the assessment of a new work – in contrast to the assessment of an anonymous work or one of a formerly unknown author. He also plays with this topic in Bourbaki Gambit.

Science-in-theatre

After his success with prose literature in the Science-in-Fiction genre, Djerassi started to write plays. Theatre, even more so than prose, seemed to fulfill his desire to work in a more "dialogical" environment than the monological natural sciences had allowed him to do. According to British director Andy Jordan, who has produced all of his plays in England, Djerassi's dramatic works are "not wholly or straightforwardly naturalistic or realistic […but] avowedly text-driven, where ideas, themes, words and language were majorly important, a fact I had always to be conscious of as the director."

Djerassi's first play, An Immaculate Misconception (1998), dealing with the in vitro fertilization procedure ICSI, was followed by two plays about priority struggles in the history of science, Oxygen (co-authored with Roald Hoffmann, 1999) and Calculus (2002), and a drama at the intersection of chemistry and art history, Phallacy (2004). Ego (2003, also produced under the title Three on a Couch), together with the docudrama Four Jews on Parnassus (2006, publ. 2008) and Foreplay (2010), his 2012 play Insufficiency is a bitter satire of both the scientific community and academic environments.

As in his novels, Djerassi's plays incorporate the life and achievements of (sometimes famous) scientists as well as new scientific technologies. The science in his plays is always scientifically plausible, although the dramatic personae and locations are fictitious. By placing scientists and research into dramatic worlds, he raises critical questions about the sciences as cultural systems and looks into internal conflicts and contradictions in science and between scientists. The constant competition between them, the need for priority in new scientific discoveries even if the required speed necessitates risky and immoral means, as well as the problematic consequences of new discoveries are important topics of the plays.

Connected with many of these questions is the role of women in the sciences (including researchers' wives and female friends). Djerassi's plays recognize the special contributions women make as scientists and to science, both directly and indirectly. His female characters are usually depicted as strong and independent, proving a strong impact of feminist thinking on his work. (especially An Immaculate Misconception: the nationalities of the main characters vary, also the endings). Where possible, Djerassi also cooperated with directors in the production of dramatic performances. All of his plays have been published in book form, many of them in a number of languages. Some of them can be downloaded from his website.

Poetry

Djerassi wrote numerous poems that were published in journals or anthologies. Some of the poems reflected his life as a chemist (e.g. Why are chemists not poets or The clock runs backwards), others his personal life (e.g. A Diary of Pique).

Non-fiction

  • Optical Rotatory Dispersion, McGraw-Hill & Company, 1960.
  • The Politics of Contraception
  • Steroids Made it Possible
  • The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse
  • From the Lab into The World: A Pill for People, Pets, and Bugs
  • Paul Klee: Masterpieces of the Djerassi Collection
  • Dalla pillola alla penna
  • This Man's Pill: Reflections on the 50th Birthday of the Pill
  • In Retrospect : From the Pill to the Pen

Fiction

  • Cantor's Dilemma, 1989
  • The Bourbaki Gambit, 1994
  • The Futurist and Other Stories
  • How I Beat Coca-Cola and Other Tales of One-Upmanship
  • Marx, Deceased. A Novel, 1996
  • Menachem's Seed. A Novel, 1997
  • NO. A Novel, 1998

Drama

  • Chemistry in Theatre: Insufficiency, Phallacy or Both
  • Foreplay: Hannah Arendt, the Two Adornos, and Walter Benjamin
  • Four Jews on Parnassus
  • An Immaculate Misconception: Sex in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction
  • L.A. Theatre Works
  • Oxygen (with Roald Hoffmann, co-author)
  • Newton's Darkness: Two Dramatic Views
  • Sex in an Age of Technological Reproduction: ICSI and TABOOS translated to Spanish and brought to scene by Dr. Àgata Baizán

Awards and honors

thumb|right|200px|Patent of the first orally highly active progestin, which led to the development of the oral contraceptive, elected to the [[National Inventors Hall of Fame]]

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) for his work on the contraceptive pill (The award was somewhat ironic in that his name at the time was on the infamous "Nixon's enemies list", compiled by Charles Colson and Richard Nixon. Djerassi learned this from an article in the San Francisco Examiner several months later.)
  • Perkin Medal (1975)
  • Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1978)
  • First recipient of the Wolf Prize, 1978
  • Priestley Medal (American Chemical Society, 1992)
  • 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 was issued to mark his 80th birthday (2005)
  • 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)
  • Djerassiplatz, the site of the University of Vienna Biology Building is named after him.

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.

On July 5, 1978, Djerassi's artist daughter Pamela (born 1950; from his second marriage, to Norma Lundholm), committed suicide, which is described in his autobiography. With Middlebrook's help, Djerassi then considered how he could help living artists, rather than collecting works of dead ones. He visited existing artist colonies, such as Yaddo and MacDowell, and decided to create his own, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. He and his wife moved to a high rise in San Francisco that they had renovated.

Carl Djerassi died on January 30, 2015, at the age of 91, from complications of liver and bone cancer.

References

  • Personal website
  • Biography
  • Carl Djerassi tells his life story at Web of Stories
  • Djerassi Resident Artists Program
  • Djerassi’s autograph from The Chemical Record
  • Bob Weintraub, Israel Chemical Society. Pincus, Djerassi, and Oral Contraceptives