One hundred years ago, a man named Percy Julian finished at the top of his class, the Class of 1920. Most of us have it pretty easy, even now, compared to what Julian had to deal with. But he went on to be a superstar anyway. This man had a combination of intelligence, bravery, and persistence that would be hard to match anytime, anywhere.
I was all set to write about his scientific achievements — and there are many — and leave it at that. But when you learn about a Black scientist of his time period, it dawns on you pretty quickly that you simply can’t avoid the barriers and the struggles. It’s like running out into the rain and trying not to get wet. They cannot be separated from the story because they decisively shape it. For all the great things America has done, we’ve also made some grave and unnecessary errors. I hope we are in the process of learning not to make them again.
Have you ever had to use a steroid for anything? Seems like we all use hydrocortisone to soothe our itches; my few bouts of poison ivy and eczema would have been a lot worse without that. But many of us also have found great relief for inflammatory afflictions by taking corticosteroids. Six years ago, I was hospitalized twice — 10 days each — in a period of a couple of months because of a debilitating autoimmune disorder. With no treatment, I’m quite sure I would have died. Once the doctors finally figured out what was wrong with me (after testing me for leukemia, HIV, bacterial infections, and other things), a daily dose of corticosteroids brought me back to normal in a week. I had to go on a different locally acting steroid for a while after that, and it helped me maintain remission. Since then, I’ve found other kinds of medications that help me a lot, and now I’m all right.
The main reason I had access to those steroids at a reasonable cost goes back to Dr. Julian. He laid the foundation of the chemical synthesis of corticosteroids, alkaloids, and hormones, making them available at large scale and lower cost. Much better than extracting them in tiny quantities from plants and animals! It changed the face of medicine.
KATHERINE JULIAN, M.D. (Percy Julian's granddaughter): I definitely was aware that my grandfather was special. I remember playing with a doll that had been sent to him by a woman, and the story was told to me why it had been sent. She had such bad arthritis that she couldn't use her hands. And after using cortisone, she was able to knit this doll and sent it to him. And I remember holding the doll and playing with the doll, and realizing that he had helped her, and that that was something that was really special.
One thing Percy Julian remembered vividly from his childhood was berry picking on and around his grandfather’s Alabama farm. Sometimes he’d wander into the surrounding forest, and it enchanted him. But one day he saw something that would stick with him for the rest of his life: a young Black man, maybe even a teenager, hanging from a tree. He was just left there. He didn’t look dangerous, only scared, Julian would later recall. Julian’s grandfather had been a slave and was now ostensibly free, but this was one of the ways he learned that neither he nor his grandfather could really be called “free” in a meaningful way.
Julian’s parents valued education, and even though there was no public school past 8th grade in his home state, he tried his best to self-educate. Somehow he got into DePauw University up in Indiana, which accepted a few Black students but would not allow them to live on campus or take meals with the other students. It actually took him awhile to roam around and find a diner that would serve him. He had to take some high-school-level classes in the evenings just to catch up, and he started to feel overwhelmed, but he hung on. He finally was able to get a room in a fraternity basement, in exchange for taking care of the furnace and other tasks.
Once Julian caught up academically and stabilized things, he started to realize that organic chemistry was what he gravitated to the most. Chemistry professor William Blanchard encouraged him because he could see Julian was a special talent.
And indeed he was. To the surprise of almost everyone at DePauw, it was announced at graduation time in 1920 that the valedictorian was going to be that Negro student, Percy Julian. He got into Phi Beta Kappa, too, and it’s said that his great-grandmother, who was still alive to see him graduate #1, showed him some of the lashing scars she still had from her days as a slave, held up the Phi Beta Kappa key he received, and told him, “This makes all of that worth it.”
Julian got his master’s degree in short order at Harvard, even though once again he was not allowed to live in the dorms with the white students. Despite three more years of study, he couldn’t finish his doctorate, not because he didn’t have the ability — he most certainly did — but because they wouldn’t let him be a teaching assistant to keep funding his research. Harvard’s haughty students weren’t about to let themselves be taught by a Black man. They didn’t even let him try.
He taught at Howard University for a while after that, but then he finally got his shot at a Ph.D. He had to go all the way to the University of Vienna (yes, the one in Austria) to do it. There, Blacks were actually sympathized with and were much more welcome. The educated people accepted Julian into their social circles, and he thrived. It might have been the best time of his life.
He finished his Ph.D. in just 2 years, even though he had a very challenging project. He identified the bioactive alkaloids in the medicinal flowering plant Corydalis cava: tetrahydrocoptisin, hydro-hydrastinin, and canadine, which is still being investigated for multiple therapeutic uses. Ernst Späth, his advisor, described him as the most extraordinary student he’d ever had.
Julian returned to Howard University but got into some nasty disagreements with other faculty and was even accused of having an affair with a married woman. Within a year, he was pushed out and had to resign.
Fortunately, good old Professor Blanchard at DePauw saw this as an opportunity and brought Julian back to be a researcher, lecturer, and lab supervisor. This would be where he’d really start to make a name for himself.
He took on the synthesis of the alkaloid physostigmine, an effective glaucoma drug found in the Calabar bean. At the time, it could only be extracted in small quantities and was therefore quite expensive.
It would be a great source of pride and achievement for anyone who could synthesize it. The laboratory of the preeminent organic chemist at Oxford University, Dr. Robert Robinson, had been working on this for some time, but Julian waded right in. You understand by now that he was no shrinking violet.
He had made good friends and shared a lot of mutual respect with a researcher named Joseph Pikl in Vienna, and he was able to arrange for DePauw to bring Pikl in. The two submitted a total of five papers, accomplishing in 1935 the total synthesis of physostigmine and also pointing out errors in what the prestigious Oxford lab had been doing. Brazen, but quite correct. This is what he and Pikl did:
Professor Blanchard was dean now, and he recommended Julian for a permanent faculty position, in light of all the acclaim he was getting, but the trustees and the other professors wouldn’t go for it. You know why. Even if you’re twice as good…..
Other universities turned him down, too. Pikl got a good job at DuPont, which was excited to take on Julian as well — that is, until they rescinded their offer and coldly explained to him, "We didn't know you were a Negro." The Institute of Paper Chemistry (IPC) in Appleton, Wisconsin did offer him a research position, but the town of Appleton stepped in and pointed out its statute that “No negro should be bedded or boarded in Appleton overnight.”
On the board of the IPC sat William O’Brien, who happened also to be a vice president at the Glidden Company. O’Brien was thankful for Appleton’s stupidity because he needed some top-notch chemists, and he could see that Julian was that. He offered Julian a director of research position at the new Soya Products facility down in Chicago. (Glidden doesn’t tout this fact on their website, but they should!)
Julian got to work on some paint-related stuff right away, of course, developing a soy protein-based material that improved paint durability in cold weather. Glidden’s profits in that area tripled, and Julian was given a raise. He also later invented Aero-Foam, another soy-protein material that acted as a flame retardant that put out fuel fires and was used extensively in World War II.
Julian wasn’t as interested in soy protein as he was in organic synthesis, though, and a fortuitous occurrence got him back onto that track. Some water had crept into a 100,000-gallon tank of soybean oil, and this seemed like a potential disaster because the oil might be ruined. But Julian noticed a white precipitate he’d seen in other plant oils, one that looked similar to a precipitate that steroidal compounds could be isolated from. He hadn’t known it could be as simple as adding a little water under the right conditions, but there it was.
He knew a couple of key things about soybean steroids: 1) Among them was stigmasterol, which could be converted by known chemistry into progesterone, and 2) Progesterone could, it had been discovered recently, help prevent miscarriages. But it was much too expensive to be prescribed widely.
This was less a chemistry problem than an engineering one, but Julian and his team soon ramped up production of progesterone they derived from cheap soybean oil. Oddly, paint company Glidden suddenly found itself the main manufacturer of the hormone progesterone, the first pound of which they sold in 1940 to Upjohn for $70,000 (about a million dollars today). They’d make testosterone later, too, based on what Julian had done, and sales of these hormones meant millions to the company.
The next big project Julian wanted to tackle at Glidden was cortisone. Like progesterone, it had the potential to help millions of people, this time with inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, if only it weren’t prohibitively expensive. It was derived at the time from the bile of slaughtered oxen in an extremely difficult 30-step synthetic process. You’d need thousands of cattle to treat one patient. The world desperately needed an inexpensive way to make cortisone.
It was around this time that Julian and his family moved into Oak Park, Illinois, a nearly all-white community full of doctors and lawyers and such. Most of the residents were quite supportive of the Julian family, but on a couple of occasions incendiary devices were thrown at their house in an attempt to burn it down and/or kill its inhabitants. Julian and his son, Percy Jr. (10) actually sat in a tree with a shotgun for many evenings after that, because Percy Julian was going to make it clear that he and his family would live where they wanted to live. That was “more important than science” to him.
Despite the threats to his and his family’s lives, he somehow found the focus to press on with the cortisone project. In 1949 Julian announced a large-scale synthesis method to arrive at a very close precursor of cortisone called 11-deoxycortisol.
Selectively putting an oxygen at just the right position, to convert 11-deoxycortisol to cortisone, had baffled Julian and all other organic chemists for years, but Julian’s gamble was that someone, somewhere, would figure that part out, and when they did, Glidden would be ready to mass-produce cortisone.
And finally, in 1952, Glidden’s friends at Upjohn did just that. They found an enzyme in a mold called Rhizopus arrhizus that could selectively put an oxygen (actually a hydroxy group, —OH) onto many steroids at the magic 11 position. The —OH could easily be converted to a keto group (=O), and now the pieces were in place for large-scale cortisone production.
Julian had used organic chemistry, process engineering, and good strategic thinking to turn a great medical discovery into a prescribable reality.
Glidden would ultimately sell off the steroid business, and they wanted Julian to return his research efforts to paints and varnishes, because honestly that was the business they understood best.
But instead Julian went off and started his own company, focused on still better ways to produce cortisone and other steroids, and he eventually sold it to what is now GlaxoSmithKline for $2.3 million (about ten times that much today).
Percy Julian could have been a top professor at a renowned school, and he could have had the freedom to launch the projects he wanted. He could exert only so much creativity at Glidden, but he absolutely maximized the hand he was dealt. I count myself among the millions of beneficiaries of his work and of his refusal to give up. America could have benefitted much more if we’d treated Dr. Julian right, but we insisted on not doing that.
In 1999, the American Chemical Society recognized Julian's synthesis of physostigmine, still used to treat glaucoma today, as one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry. It designated the laboratory that he worked in at DePauw a National Historic Chemical Landmark. The man who was denied a professorship because of his skin color went on to be one of the all-time greats anyway.
The plaque reads:
In 1935, in Minshall Laboratory, DePauw alumnus Percy L. Julian (1899-1975) first synthesized the drug physostigmine, previously only available from its natural source, the Calabar bean. His pioneering research led to the process that made physostigmine readily available for the treatment of glaucoma. It was the first of Julian’s lifetime of achievements in the chemical synthesis of commercially important natural products.
I wish he’d been alive to see that.
Most of us won’t face obstacles nearly as tall and as wide as those that Percy Julian had to contend with. He showed us how to maximize our hand, whatever exactly that is. His story should inspire us to do that, but also it should push us to work towards an America that doesn’t make the same unjust and self-defeating mistakes we’ve made in the past.
That will keep adding even more to Percy Julian’s legacy.
Two great resources that do more justice to Percy Julian’s story than I could here are:
► NOVA: Forgotten Genius (click on “Transcript” because the video is sadly no longer available)
► Percy Lavon Julian: Pioneer of Medicinal Chemistry Synthesis, from the journal Laboratory Medicine