Percy Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was born on the eleventh of April 1899 at Montgomery, Alabama, the eldest of six children of James Sumner Julian — a Black railway-mail clerk of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad — and Elizabeth Lena Adams Julian, a public-school teacher. He was raised in the Black professional Montgomery of the post-Plessy period.

He was placed at six at the Montgomery State Normal School preparatory programme and at seventeen at DePauw University at Greencastle, Indiana — having been admitted on the strength of an entrance examination and not on a secondary diploma, since Montgomery did not offer a Black high school. He took the bachelor’s in chemistry at DePauw in 1920 — valedictorian of the class.

He took the master of arts in chemistry at Harvard University in 1923 on an Austin Fellowship — the first Black recipient of the Austin Fellowship at Harvard — and was barred from the Harvard chemistry doctoral programme on the racial grounds of the chemistry department of the period. He took the doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1931 under the principal Vienna chemistry professor Ernst Späth — the principal European steroid-chemistry scholar of the inter-war period.

He was hired in 1932 by Howard University at Washington, D.C. as chair of the Department of Chemistry, the position he held until 1936 when he returned to DePauw on an additional General Education Board fellowship.

He completed at DePauw in February 1935 — at the third attempt — the principal synthetic-organic chemistry triumph of his early career: the total synthesis of physostigmine, the principal alkaloid of the Calabar bean and the principal drug at the time of glaucoma treatment. The Julian synthesis was the first published total synthesis of physostigmine and was at the time of publication the principal synthetic-organic chemistry achievement of an American chemist.

He was hired in 1936 by the Glidden Company at Chicago — a paint-and-soybean-products firm — as director of research of the Soya Products Division. The Glidden hire was the first senior research-chemist position held by a Black chemist at a major American industrial firm.

He developed at Glidden across the period 1936 to 1953 the principal post-war steroid-chemistry programmes of the firm — including the synthesis of progesterone from the soybean sterol stigmasterol (1940), the synthesis of testosterone from the soybean sterol (1941), the synthesis of the corticosteroid cortisone from the soybean (1949), and the synthesis of the corticosteroid prednisone from the soybean (1953).

The Julian cortisone synthesis of February 1949 — published at the same period as the parallel Mayo Clinic synthesis of Edward Calvin Kendall, Tadeusz Reichstein and Philip Showalter Hench — secured the synthetic-organic cortisone production at industrial scale and reduced the cortisone treatment cost by a factor of approximately five hundred. The Mayo Clinic team received the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the cortisone biological work; Julian was not nominated.

He founded in 1953 the Julian Laboratories at Franklin Park, Illinois — the principal Black-owned chemical-synthesis firm of the post-war period — and sold it in 1961 to Smith Kline and French Laboratories at two and a third million dollars. The sale made Julian one of the first Black chemical-industry millionaires.

He was elected in 1973 to the United States National Academy of Sciences — the second Black member of the Academy.

He died at Waukegan, Illinois on the nineteenth of April 1975 of complications of liver cancer, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the principal Black industrial chemist of the post-war period.