38 Facts About Percy Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants.

Percy Julian was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine and was a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol.

Percy Julian's work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.

Percy Julian later started his own company to synthesize steroid intermediates from the wild Mexican yam.

Percy Julian's work helped greatly reduce the cost of steroid intermediates to large multinational pharmaceutical companies, helping to significantly expand the use of several important drugs, including synthesizing cortisone.

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Percy Julian was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry.

Percy Julian was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist inducted from any field.

Percy Julian's father, James, whose own father had been a slave, was employed as a clerk in the Railway Service of the United States Post Office, and his mother Elizabeth was a schoolteacher.

At a time when access to an education beyond the eighth grade was extremely rare for African Americans, Percy Julian's parents steered all of their children toward higher education.

Percy Julian was not allowed to live in a college dormitory and first stayed in an off-campus boarding home, which refused to serve him meals.

Percy Julian 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.

Percy Julian graduated from DePauw in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian.

However, worried that white students would resent being taught by an African American, Harvard withdrew Percy Julian's teaching assistantship, making it impossible for him to complete his Ph.

In 1929, while an instructor at Howard University, Percy Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.

Percy Julian studied under Ernst Spath and was considered an impressive student.

Percy Julian freely participated in intellectual social gatherings, attended the opera, and found greater acceptance among his peers.

Percy Julian was one of the first African Americans to receive a Ph.

At Howard, in part due to his position as a department head, Percy Julian became caught up in university politics, setting off a chain of scandals.

Around this same time, Percy Julian became entangled in an interpersonal conflict with his laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson.

Percy Julian's letters revealed "how he fooled the [Howard] president into accepting his plans for the chemistry building" and "how he bluffed his good friend into appointing" a professor of Percy Julian's liking.

Percy 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.

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 Percy Julian completed his synthesis, the melting point matched the correct one for natural physostigmine from the calabar bean.

Percy Julian extracted stigmasterol, which took its name from Physostigma venenosum, the west African calabar bean that he hoped could serve as raw material for the synthesis of human steroidal hormones.

In 1936 Percy Julian was denied a professorship at DePauw for racial reasons.

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DuPont offered a job to Pikl, but declined to hire Percy Julian, despite his superlative qualifications as an organic chemist, apologizing that they were "unaware he was a Negro".

Percy Julian next applied for a job at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Percy Julian 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.

Percy Julian supervised the assembly of the plant at Glidden when he arrived in 1936.

Percy Julian then designed and supervised the construction of the world's first plant for the production of industrial-grade, isolated soy protein from oil-free soybean meal.

Percy Julian was ozonizing 100 pounds daily of mixed sterol dibromides.

Percy Julian's work made possible the production of these hormones on a larger industrial scale, with the potential of reducing the cost of treating hormonal deficiencies.

Percy Julian announced the synthesis, starting with the cheap and readily available pregnenolone of the steroid cortexolone, a molecule that differed from cortisone by a single missing oxygen atom; and possibly 17a-hydroxyprogesterone and pregnenetriolone, which he hoped might be effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis, but unfortunately they were not.

Around 1950, Percy Julian moved his family to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, becoming the first African-American family to reside there.

Percy Julian won a contract to provide Upjohn with $2 million worth of progesterone .

Percy Julian used his own money and borrowed from friends to build a processing plant in Mexico, but he could not get a permit from the government to harvest the yams.

Abraham Zlotnik, a former Jewish University of Vienna classmate whom Percy Julian had helped escape from the Holocaust, led a search to find a new yam source in Guatemala for the company.

Percy Julian helped to found the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of Chicago, where he served on the boards of various organizations and universities.