In the early 1900s, scientists were just beginning to understand the diversity and importance of steroids—a group of molecules made in the body that includes the sex hormones (progesterone, estrogens, and testosterone) and the hormones involved in promoting inflammation (cortisol). In addition to natural hormones, steroids can also be used as therapeutic drugs. But at the time, steroids had to be isolated from animal sources to be used as drugs, which was an expensive and low-yield process. During his career as a chemist, Percy Julian discovered a method for synthesizing these unique molecules from abundant plant sources, like soybeans, enabling cheaper mass production of many useful steroids. For this Black History Month, we will be discussing Julian’s remarkable life and career, the challenges he faced, and the legacy he left behind.
Percy Julian was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama. His parents pushed him to get a good education, but at the height of segregation, there were no Black high schools for him to attend. Instead, he attended a teacher training school until 1916, when he was offered the chance to attend DePauw University in Indiana. During his time at DePauw, Julian had to take extra remedial courses to catch up with his white classmates while working to afford his tuition and facing considerable racial discrimination. Despite these challenges, he graduated as valedictorian in 1920 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
After a couple of years as a chemistry instructor at Fisk University, Julian won a fellowship to do graduate work at Harvard where he became the first African American to earn a master’s degree in chemistry. But Harvard refused to give him the teaching assistantship he would need to complete a doctorate, so he took a position as the head of the chemistry department at Howard University—a historically Black university. In 1929, he received a grant to continue his studies abroad at the University of Vienna, and he returned to Howard in 1931 with his Ph.D.
A couple of years later, Julian was forced to leave Howard due to internal politics and scandal, but a former professor of his at DePauw University was able to get him a position there as a research fellow. In 1935, he and his collaborator Joseph Pikl successfully determined a method for synthesizing physostigmine—a drug used to treat glaucoma. This initial discovery solidified Julian’s reputation as a renowned chemist.
Despite this accomplishment, Julian was not offered a faculty position at DePauw. Frustrated with the lack of opportunities in academia, he started looking for industry positions. After many dead ends, Julian got a position at the Glidden Company as their director of soybean research. At the time, many companies were hiring chemists to develop new industrial applications for soybean oil. During his 18 years of work at Glidden, Julian’s research was responsible for numerous new patents and products, including a fire-retardant foam that was widely used during WWII.
At the same time, the research community was becoming increasingly interested in finding cost-effective methods for the bulk synthesis of steroids. Steroids are categorized as lipids—molecules that don’t dissolve in water—but the structure of steroids is unlike most other lipid structures. The core steroid structure is a series of three fused 6-carbon rings followed by one 5-carbon ring. In the human body, one of the most common steroids is cholesterol, which is synthesized in the liver and serves as the precursor to all three of the primary sex hormones—estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone.
Humans and animals are not the only ones that use steroids. Plants, like Julian’s soybeans, also produce steroid compounds, which can be converted into human steroids. In particular, the soybean steroid stigmasterol, which was also a by-product of Julian’s physostigmine synthesis, can be converted into human hormones like progesterone. While scientists knew how to convert stigmasterol into progesterone, there weren’t any efficient methods for producing the drug in bulk. As a result, therapeutic progesterone was very costly to obtain. At the time, progesterone, a key hormone for maintaining pregnancy, was used to prevent miscarriages.
Three years after Julian started his job at Glidden, there was an accident that resulted in water leaking into a large tank of soybean oil. The whole tank was spoiled, but Julian noticed a white sludge at the bottom of the tank full of some sort of crystals. The crystals turned out to be stigmasterol, the steroid that could be converted into progesterone. This discovery facilitated the development of a method for the mass production of progesterone. Today, progesterone is used in contraceptives, hormone replacement therapies, and other therapeutic applications.
In the 1940s, scientists discovered that the steroid cortisone could be used to treat rheumatoid arthritis—a disease characterized by inflammation of the joints that causes debilitating pain. Cortisone was lauded as a wonder drug in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, but at the time, it was so difficult to obtain that a single ounce could run over $4,000. To circumvent a difficult and costly synthesis, Julian demonstrated how a similar compound known as Reichstein’s Substance S could be converted into cortisone. Later, another company found a way to use microorganisms to mass-produce Substance S and used Julian’s method to convert it into cortisone for distribution.
Julian left Glidden in 1953 and started his own company called Julian Laboratories, which specialized in the synthesis of a variety of steroids and steroid precursors that pharmaceutical companies would buy to convert into drugs. It was a big gamble that paid off for Julian, making him a millionaire by 1961. The company also gave Julian the opportunity to hire and train scores of young and promising Black chemists who would have had trouble breaking into science elsewhere. In 1973, Julian was the second African American elected to the National Academy of Sciences. By the time of his death in 1975, he had more than 100 patents to his name, 18 honorary degrees, and over a dozen civic and scientific awards.
If you enjoyed this month’s post, check out the Black History Month tag for more great science stories! For now, check out last month’s blog post on the wide world of viruses. Comment or email us at contact@anyonecanscience.com to let us know what you think of this week’s post. And subscribe below for weekly science emails!
