The father of
the oral contraceptive pill, Carl Djerassi, was born in 1923 into a
Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. He lived in Bulgaria with his parents
as a young child and then returned to Vienna with his mother following
his parents' divorce. With the spread of the Nazi regime to Austria in
1938, he returned to Bulgaria to live with his father. In 1939, he
immigrated to the United States with his mother.
In the US,
Djerassi pursued studies in chemistry and in 1949 was appointed
associate director of chemical research at a pharmaceutical company
called Syntex in Mexico City. There, he worked on a new synthesis of
cortisone. His team later synthesized norethindrone - a
progestin-analogue that was effective when taken orally. This became
part of the first successful oral contraceptive, the combined oral
contraceptive pill (COCP). The COCP became commonly known as the
birth-control pill, or simply, the pill.
Click on the audio
link below to listen to a more extensive interview with Carl Djerassi.
Deutsche
Welle: Before you left Austria, did you have any plans for how your life
was going to go?
Bildunterschrift:
Großansicht des Bildes
mit der Bildunterschrift: Djerassi
was amused to be linked to sexual revolution
Carl Djerassi: Before
the Nazis came to Austria and I had to flee, I would have expected to be
a physician, because both my parents were physicians and I was
basically brought up in a doctor's office.
To move
onto the moment when you and your team synthesized the first digestible
form of progestin that eventually became the pill - what you were trying
to create was not initially concerned with contraception, was it?
Whenever people ask me
that - and it's a very logical question to ask - I cannot answer yes or
no, because it's more complicated than that. I always start with the
fact that a lot was known about progesterone at the time. The compound
had been isolated in the 30s, synthesized and then used in medicine
continuously for the treatment of menstrual irregularities and
infertility. But progesterone is not orally active, so it was always
given by injection.
At that time, when I
worked at this small pharmaceutical company Syntex, we wanted to develop
some drugs of our own that we could sell, not only patent, under the
name Syntex, rather than just being suppliers to other companies. One of
the projects that were selected at the time was to make a compound - a
progestin - that had the biological activity of progesterone or better,
but that was orally active. And we wanted to do it for uses in medicine,
which were menstrual irregularities and infertility. Also, there was
someone at the national cancer institute who was interested in possibly
using progesterone for cervical cancer.
That progesterone
could also be used as a contraceptive was obvious. It was something that
an Austrian named Ludwig Haberlandt had already discovered in the 1920s
and early 1930s. But you need to remember that at that time there was
essentially no interest in contraception in the pharmaceutical industry
in the United States or elsewhere, because that was after the war. At
that point, millions of people had died and millions of people postponed
having a family, so that was not their high priority.
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes
mit der Bildunterschrift: Contraception
changed many people's attitude towards sex
During that time,
after we synthesized the compound, we sent it to a lot of different
biologists. One of them was a man named Gregory Pincus, who worked in
the United States and was interested in the application of oral
contraception. And he was also a very good entrepreneur - he really
pushed this after that material had already been approved for clinical
use by the food and drug administration in the United States. Three
years later, they permitted these compounds to be used for
contraception.
The one that we made,
Norethindrone, is still used by millions of women, and all the
subsequent oral contraceptives that have been developed are very close
chemical relatives of the first compound that we made.
Was there
anything novel in the way that you synthesized that progestin at the
time?
Very much so. The
chemistry was very difficult, very sophisticated. To explain that on the
radio would be impossible, because even if I explained it to a chemist I
would have to say, 'Do you have a paper and pencil so I can show you
the chemical structures?'
It's
certainly the invention you're most well-known for. But would you say
that of all the work that you've done in chemistry it was the most
creative?
No, absolutely not.
I've done many other things that I think were much more significant in
retrospect as chemical discoveries. I've published well over a thousand
papers, and maybe 60 or 80 were in this area, but none of the others
were in the area of contraception. But that particular discovery had
much bigger societal effects than any other.
You've had
at this point about 60 years to think about the meaning of this
chemical that you synthesized. Has that changed over the years? Do you
feel like any part of this equation between the sexual revolution and
the pill has been overblown?
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes
mit der Bildunterschrift: The
60s were a time of great social change
I don't think it has
been overblown - it was dealt with too simplistically, I think. And it's
understandable why. It had an enormous impact of women, and we all know
this. But both positively and negatively, it was credited and blamed
for the sexual revolution. And while I was amused and perhaps even
pleased that people said I was partly responsible for that, I think
that's too simplified.
The 1960s were exactly
the right time for an oral contraceptive to be introduced, because of
all these social movements - the Beatles, the drug culture, the hippie
culture, and especially the women's liberation movement. And they were
all associated with the liberation of sexual behavior, even some
promiscuous sexual behavior.
Interview: Sruthi
Pinnamanen (ew)
Editor: Kate Bowen
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5536408,00.html