Without him, the birth control pill wouldn’t exist.
Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was born in Montgomery, Alabama. Once, during childhood, he came across a lynched man hanging from a tree near his home. Such was life in the Jiim Crow South.
Despite the constraints of racism of the time, Julian attended college in Indiana. Due to segregation rules, he was not allowed to live in the dorms on campus and had to find off-campus housing instead. However, his off-campus housing would not allow him to eat because, well, racism. After completing undergraduate, he went to Harvard to pursue a masters degree in chemistry. Initially, he was offered a teaching assistantship, but the university became worried that white students would resent being taught by a black teacher, so they rescinded his assistantship.
After Harvard, he went to the University of Vienna to earn his PhD in chemistry. He was one of the first black Americans to study in Austria.
After earning his PhD, he returned to the States to teach at Howard University. However, a series of scandals and faculty conflicts lead him to resign in 1932.
After leaving Howard, Julian joined Glidden Company, a maker of soybean oil products. It was here that Julian made his mark on the world. While at Glidden, Percy Julian provided the soy protein necessary to create Aer-O Foam, a fire suppressant that proved vital during WWII. After this, he developed a process to isolate plant sterols from soybean oil. The sterols alone were enough to make him rich by selling them as sex hormones. He further isolated the hormones into progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone. His processes were also used to isolate cortisone which was deemed to effective against rheumatoid arthritis but the process at the time for extracting it was costly.
TL;DR
- Percy Julian was a chemist in a time when few black people went into STEM fields.
- His work was instrumental in reducing the price of many steroid-based drugs.
- His patented processes facilitated the creation of the birth control pill along with many other drugs.
What You Should Do Now:
- Read this more detailed biography of Percy Julian.
- Check out this photo campaign put together by black Harvard students.
28 Days of Inspirational Black People:
- Ed Brooke
- Blanche Bruce
- Andrew Young
- Denys Cowan
- Antoine Fuqua
- John Singleton
- Countee Cullen
- Dennis Kimetto
- Robert Hayden
- Lee Daniels
- Anthony Mackie/Falcon
- Val James
- Abebe Bikila
- Steve McQueen
- Ernest J. Gaines
- Charlie Sifford
- Matt Baker
- Black Panther
- A.G. Gaston
- Bradford Young
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Guion Bluford
- Carter G. Woodson
- Ralph Bunche
- William Monroe Trotter
- Douglas Wilder
- Oscar Micheaux