卡尔·杰拉西1923—2015

杰拉西还是几本科幻小说的作者。

生平

杰拉西在维也纳出生，因为其父是保加利亚人，出生后一个月，就随其父母回到保加利亚索菲亚。

在其父母离婚之后，杰拉西跟随其母亲回到维也纳。

1951年与墨西哥的Luis E. Miramontes和匈牙利的George Rosenkranz一起参与了孕激素炔诺酮的研发工作。他于1978年获得第一届沃尔夫化学奖。

Carl Djerassi (October 29, 1923 – January 30, 2015) was a Viennese-born Bulgarian-American pharmaceutical chemist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of Djerassi Resident Artists Program with Diane Wood Middlebrook. He is best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pills, nicknamed the "father of the pill".

Early life

Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna, Austria, and spent the first years of his infancy in Sofia, Bulgaria, the home of his father, Samuel Djerassi, a dermatologist and specialist in sexually transmitted diseases. His mother was Alice Friedmann, a Viennese dentist and physician. Both parents were Jewish.

Following his parents' divorce, Djerassi and his mother moved to Vienna. Until the age of 14, he attended the same grammar school that Sigmund Freud had attended many years earlier; spending summers in Bulgaria with his father.

Austria refused him citizenship and after the Anschluss, his father briefly remarried his mother in 1938 to allow Carl and his mother to escape the Nazi regime and flee to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he lived with his father for a year.

Education

Djerassi started his college career at Newark Junior College, after moving to the United States with his mother when he was 16. He had previously attended the American College of Sofia, a high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he became fluent in English. Because of the name of his high school, he was misunderstood and enrolled into Newark Junior College before graduating high school. After a year at Newark Junior College, Djerassi wrote a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt asking for help with a room and board and tuition scholarship to a four-year college. He received a response from the Institute of International Education with a full scholarship to Tarkio College where he briefly attended, and then studied chemistry at Kenyon College, where he graduated summa cum laude.

Career

In 1942/43, Djerassi worked for CIBA in New Jersey, developing Pyribenzamine (tripelennamine), his first patent and one of the first commercial antihistamines.

In 1949, Djerassi became associate director of research at Syntex in Mexico City and remained there through 1951. He said that one factor influencing him to choose Syntex was that they had a DU spectrophotometer. He worked on a new synthesis of cortisone based on diosgenin, a steroid sapogenin derived from a Mexican wild yam. His team later synthesized norethisterone (norethindrone), the first highly active progestin analogue that was effective when taken by mouth. This became part of one of the first successful combined oral contraceptive pills, known colloquially as the birth-control pill, or simply, the Pill.

Awards and honors

Djerassi won numerous awards during his career including:

Ernest Guenther Award in Chemistry and Natural Products by the American Chemical Society (1960)

Scheele Award (1972)

National Medal of Science (President of the United States of America, 1973) for his work on the contraceptive pill (The award was somewhat ironic in that his name at the time was on the infamous "Nixon's enemies list", compiled by Charles Colson and Richard Nixon. Djerassi learned this from an article in the San Francisco Examiner several months later.)

• Perkin Medal (1975)
• Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1978)
• First recipient of the Wolf Prize, 1978

Personal life

Djerassi described himself as a "Jewish atheist".

Djerassi was married three times and had two children. He and Virginia Jeremiah were married in 1943 and divorced in 1950. Djerassi married writer Norma Lundholm (1917–2006) later that year. They had two children together, and were divorced in 1976. One year after his second divorce, Djerassi began a relationship with Diane Middlebrook, a Stanford University professor of English and biographer. In 1985, they were married and they lived between San Francisco and London, until her death on December 15, 2007, due to cancer.

On July 5, 1978, Djerassi's daughter Pamela, an artist (born 1950; from his second marriage, to Norma Lundholm), committed suicide, which is described in his autobiography.