Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. Julian was the first person to synthesize the natural product physostigmine, and a pioneer in industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and artificial hormones that led to birth control pills.
Julian started his own company to synthesize steroid intermediates from wild Mexican yams. His work helped to greatly reduce the cost of steroid intermediates to large multinational pharmaceutical companies. This significantly expanded the use of several important drugs, including synthetic cortisone. Julian was one of the first African Americans to be allowed to earn a doctorate in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist, after David Blackwell, inducted into the organization from any field. Throughout his career, Julian received over 130 patents.
Early life and family Percy Lavon Julian was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, as the first child of six born to James Sumner Julian and Elizabeth Lena Adams Julian. Both of his parents were graduates of what was to be Alabama State University. His father was employed as a clerk in the Railway Service of the United States Post Office, and his mother was a school teacher.Julian family in the 1900 U.S. Census; Montgomery, Alabama; James lived with his wife's siblings: Mather P. Adams (1884–? ); George Adams (1886–? ); Carrie L. Adams (1891–? ); Ethel M. Adams (1893–? ). James is listed as a mail carrier.
Education and academic career At a time when access to an education beyond the eighth grade was extremely rare for African Americans, Julian's parents steered all of their children toward higher education. Julian attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. The college accepted few African-American students. The segregated nature of the town subjected him to social humiliations. He was not allowed to live in a college dormitory and first stayed in an off-campus boarding home, which refused to serve him meals. It took him days before he found an establishment where he could eat. He 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. Julian graduated from DePauw in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian.
By 1930, his father had moved the family to Greencastle so that all his children could attend DePauw. He still worked as a railroad postal clerk.1930 US Census; Greencastle, Indiana with Julians James owned his own home; his house, worth $3,000 in 1930, was worth about $ in 2025. After graduating from DePauw, Julian wanted to obtain his doctorate in chemistry, but learned it would be difficult for an African American to do so. Instead, he obtained a position as a chemistry instructor at Fisk University. In 1923 he received an Austin Fellowship in Chemistry, which allowed him to attend Harvard University to obtain his M.S. However, worried that white students would resent being taught by an African American, Harvard withdrew Julian's teaching assistantship, making it impossible for him to complete his Ph.D. there.
In 1929, while an instructor at Howard University, Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1931. He studied under Ernst Späth and was considered an impressive student. Europe gave him freedom from the racial prejudices that had stifled him in the States. He freely participated in intellectual social gatherings, attended the opera, and found greater acceptance among his peers. Julian was one of the first African Americans to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry, after St. Elmo Brady and Edward M.A. Chandler.
After returning from Vienna, Julian taught for one year at Howard University. At Howard, in part due to his position as a department head, Julian became caught up in university politics, setting off a chain of scandals. At university president Mordecai Wyatt Johnson's request, he goaded white professor of chemistry Jacob Shohan (Ph.D., Harvard), into resigning.Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 223-24. In late May 1932, Shohan retaliated by releasing to the local African-American newspaper the letters Julian had written to him from Vienna. The letters described "a variety of subjects from wine, pretty Viennese women, music and dances, to chemical experiments and plans for the new chemical building." In the letters, he spoke with familiarity, and some derision, of members of the Howard University faculty, calling one well-known dean an "ass (also known as a donkey)".
Around this same time, Julian also became entangled in an interpersonal conflict with his laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson. Julian had recommended Thompson for dismissal in March 1932. Thompson sued Julian for "alienating the affections of his wife", Anna Roselle Thompson, stating he had seen them together in a sexual tryst. Julian counter-sued him for libel. When Thompson was fired, he too gave the paper intimate and personal letters which Julian had written to him from Vienna. 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 Julian's liking. Through the summer of 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American published all of Julian's letters. Eventually, the scandal and accompanying pressure forced Julian to resign.
At the lowest point in Julian's career, his former mentor, William Martin Blanchard, a professor of chemistry at DePauw, provided him with much-needed assistance, by offering Julian a position to teach organic chemistry at DePauw in 1932. He received support from the Rosenwald Fund to teach at DePauw. 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. In 1935, Julian and Pikl completed the total synthesis of physostigmine and confirmed the structural formula assigned to it. 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 Julian completed his synthesis, the melting point matched the correct one for natural physostigmine from the calabar bean. Julian also 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. At about this time, in 1934, Butenandt and Fernholz, in Germany, had shown that stigmasterol, isolated from soybean oil, could be converted to progesterone by synthetic organic chemistry.
Private sector work: Glidden Hiring In 1956 Julian was denied a professorship at DePauw for racial reasons. DuPont offered a job to Pikl, but declined to hire Julian, despite his superlative qualifications as an organic chemist, apologizing that they were "unaware he was black". Julian next applied for a job at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin. However, Appleton was a sundown town, forbidding African Americans from staying overnight, explicitly stating "No Negro should be a bed or boarded overnight in Appleton." Meanwhile, Julian had written to the Glidden Company, a supplier of soybean oil products, to request a five-gallon sample of the oil to use as his starting point for the synthesis of human steroidal sex hormones (in part because his wife was experiencing infertility). After receiving the request, W. J. O'Brien, a vice-president at Glidden, telephoned Julian, offering him the position of director of research at Glidden's Soya Products Division in Chicago. Nova has posited that he was 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.
Soy protein Julian supervised the assembly of the plant at Glidden when he arrived in 1936. He 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. Isolated soy protein could replace the more expensive milk casein in industrial applications such as coating and sizing of paper, glue for making Douglas fir plywood, and in the manufacture of water-based paints. At the start of World War II, Glidden sent a sample of Julian's isolated soy protein to National Foam System Inc. (today a unit of Kidde Fire Fighting), which used it to develop Aer-O-Foam, the U.S. Navy's firefighting "bean soup." While it was not exactly Julian's brainchild, his meticulous care in the preparation of the soy protein made the firefighting foam possible. When a hydrolyzate of isolated soy protein was fed into a water stream, the mixture was converted into a foam by means of an aerating nozzle. The soy protein foam was used to smother oil and gasoline fires aboard ships and was particularly useful on aircraft carriers. It has saved the lives of thousands of sailors and airmen. Citing this achievement, in 1947 the NAACP awarded Julian the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor. The 1943 United States Office of War Information film Food for Fighters features Julian as the soy expert when describing the inclusion of soy to boost the nutrition of K-rations.
Steroids Percy's research at Glidden changed direction in 1940 when he began work on synthesizing progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone from the plant sterols stigmasterol and sitosterol, isolated from soybean oil by a foam technique he invented and patented.U.S. Patent 2,273,046 At that time, clinicians were discovering many uses for the newly discovered hormones. However, only minute quantities could be extracted from hundreds of pounds of animal spinal cords. In 1940, Julian was able to produce of mixed soy sterols daily, which had a value of $10,000 ($ today) as sex hormones. Julian was soon ozonizing daily of mixed sterol dibromides. The soy stigmasterol was easily converted into commercial quantities of the female hormone progesterone, and the first pound of progesterone that he produced, valued at $63,500 ($ today), was shipped to buyer UpjohnBryan A. Wilson and Monte S. Willis, "Percy Lavon Julian, Pioneer of Medicinal Chemistry Synthesis" , Lab Medicine. in an armored car. Production of other sex hormones soon followed.