Percy Lavon Julian

Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants.

Early life and family

Percy Lavon Julian was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, as the first child of six born to James Sumner Julian and Elizabeth Lena Adams Julian. Both of his parents were graduates of what was to be Alabama State University. His father was employed as a clerk in the Railway Service of the United States Post Office, and his mother was a school teacher.

Education and academic career

At a time when access to an education beyond the eighth grade was extremely rare for African Americans, Julian's parents steered all of their children toward higher education. Julian attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. The college accepted few African-American students. The segregated nature of the town subjected him to social humiliations. He was not allowed to live in a college dormitory and first stayed in an off-campus boarding home, which refused to serve him meals. It took him days before he found an establishment where he could eat. He later found work firing the furnace, waiting tables, and doing other odd jobs in a fraternity house; in return, he was allowed to sleep in the attic and eat at the house. Julian graduated from DePauw in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian. James owned his own home; his house, worth $3,000 in 1930, was worth about $ in 2025. After graduating from DePauw, Julian wanted to obtain his doctorate in chemistry, but learned it would be difficult for an African American to do so. Instead, he obtained a position as a chemistry instructor at Fisk University. In 1923 he received an Austin Fellowship in Chemistry, which allowed him to attend Harvard University to obtain his M.S. However, worried that white students would resent being taught by an African American, Harvard withdrew Julian's teaching assistantship, making it impossible for him to complete his Ph.D. there.

In 1929, while an instructor at Howard University, Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1931. He studied under Ernst Späth and was considered an impressive student. Europe gave him freedom from the racial prejudices that had stifled him in the States. He freely participated in intellectual social gatherings, attended the opera, and found greater acceptance among his peers. Julian was one of the first African Americans to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry, after St. Elmo Brady and Edward M.A. Chandler. he goaded white professor of chemistry Jacob Shohan (Ph.D., Harvard), into resigning. In late May 1932, Shohan retaliated by releasing to the local African-American newspaper the letters Julian had written to him from Vienna. The letters described "a variety of subjects from wine, pretty Viennese women, music and dances, to chemical experiments and plans for the new chemical building."

Around this same time, Julian also became entangled in an interpersonal conflict with his laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson. Julian had recommended Thompson for dismissal in March 1932. Thompson sued Julian for "alienating the affections of his wife", Julian then helped Josef Pikl, a fellow student at the University of Vienna, to come to the United States to work with him at DePauw. In 1935, Julian and Pikl completed the total synthesis of physostigmine and confirmed the structural formula assigned to it. Robert Robinson of Oxford University in the U.K. had been the first to publish a synthesis of physostigmine, but Julian noticed that the quoted melting point of Robinson's end product was incorrect, indicating that he had not created it. When Julian completed his synthesis, the melting point matched the correct one for natural physostigmine from the calabar bean. Meanwhile, Julian had written to the Glidden Company, a supplier of soybean oil products, to request a five-gallon sample of the oil to use as his starting point for the synthesis of human steroidal sex hormones (in part because his wife was experiencing infertility). After receiving the request, W. J. O'Brien, a vice-president at Glidden, telephoned Julian, offering him the position of director of research at Glidden's Soya Products Division in Chicago. He was very likely offered the job by O'Brien because he was fluent in German, and Glidden had just purchased a modern continuous countercurrent solvent extraction plant from Germany for the extraction of vegetable oil from soybeans for paints and other uses.

Steroids

Percy's research at Glidden changed direction in 1940 when he began work on synthesizing progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone from the plant sterols stigmasterol and sitosterol, isolated from soybean oil by a foam technique he invented and patented. At that time, clinicians were discovering many uses for the newly discovered hormones. However, only minute quantities could be extracted from hundreds of pounds of animal spinal cords. In 1940, Julian was able to produce of mixed soy sterols daily, which had a value of $10,000 ($ today) as sex hormones. Julian was soon ozonizing daily of mixed sterol dibromides. The soy stigmasterol was easily converted into commercial quantities of the female hormone progesterone, and the first pound of progesterone that he produced, valued at $63,500 ($ today), was shipped to buyer Upjohn in an armored car.), a molecule that differed from cortisone by a single missing oxygen atom;  and possibly 17α-hydroxyprogesterone and pregnenetriolone, which he hoped might also be effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis, On December 2, 1953, Pfizer acquired exclusive licenses of Glidden patents for the synthesis of Substance S. Pfizer had developed a fermentation process for microbial 11β-oxygenation of steroids in a single step that could convert Substance S directly to 11β-hydrocortisone (cortisol), with Syntex undertaking large-scale production of cortexolone at very low cost. Julian died of liver cancer in Waukegan, Illinois on April 19, 1975, a week after his 76th birthday.

Personal

On December 24, 1935, he married Anna Roselle (Ph.D. in sociology, 1937, University of Pennsylvania). They had two children: Percy Lavon Julian Jr. (August 31, 1940 – February 24, 2008), who became a noted civil rights lawyer in Madison, Wisconsin;

In 1950, the Chicago Sun-Times named Percy Julian the Chicagoan of the Year.
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Percy Lavon Julian on his list of 100 Greatest African-Americans.
In 2011, the qualifying exam preparation committee at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine was named for Percy Julian.
In 2014, Google honored him with a Doodle.
In 2019, asteroid 5622 Percy julian, discovered by Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1990, was named in his memory.

Nova documentary

Ruben Santiago-Hudson portrayed Percy Julian in the Public Broadcasting Service Nova documentary about his life, called "Forgotten Genius". It was presented on the PBS network on February 6, 2007, sponsored by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation with further funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Approximately sixty of Julian's family members, friends, and work associates were interviewed for the docudrama.

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External links

Percy Julian Chemistry and Civil Rights. Resources from Teachers' Domain
Bernhard Witkop, "Percy Lavon Julian", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (1980)
Profile of Percy Julian – The Black Inventor Online Museum
Percy Julian Archives at DePauw University
Forgotten Genius, PBS Nova documentary and video
Video: "Bringing Chemistry to Prime Time", a talk by Nova producer Steve Lyons on the creation of the Percy Julian PBS documentary
"Percy Julian, Chemist Extraordinaire" (biography), Shunya's Notes website, June 24, 2007.
Glidden Co. Soy Information Center, Glidden Company.