Percy Lavon Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on the eleventh of April 1899, the grandson of an enslaved man and the son of a railway clerk and a schoolteacher. He took his undergraduate degree at DePauw University (Phi Beta Kappa, valedictorian, 1920), his master's at Harvard (1923), and — after Harvard refused to extend his teaching fellowship on racial grounds — his doctorate at the University of Vienna (1931).

In 1935 he and his Austrian colleague Josef Pikl completed the first total laboratory synthesis of physostigmine — an alkaloid drug used in the treatment of glaucoma, which had previously been extractable only from the Calabar bean. The synthesis remains one of the foundational achievements of twentieth-century organic chemistry.

He joined the Glidden Company in Chicago in 1936 as Director of Research and used his position to develop industrial-scale syntheses of steroidal hormones from soybean oil. His method for producing progesterone and cortisone at industrial scale reduced the price of cortisone treatment for rheumatoid arthritis from approximately three hundred dollars per gram to less than one dollar per gram. The reduction made these treatments available to ordinary patients for the first time.

He founded his own firm, Julian Laboratories, in 1953, ran it until 1961, and sold it to Smith Kline & French for two and a third million dollars (roughly twenty-eight million in current terms) — making him among the first African American industrial millionaires.

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 — the second African American so elected after the geneticist David Blackwell.

He died in Waukegan, Illinois, on the nineteenth of April 1975, age seventy-six.

He is honored here as the chemist whose syntheses put steroidal medicine within reach of ordinary patients.