What did percy julian invent

Percy lavon julian contributions to science
When did percy julian die
What is percy julian famous for

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Robert Robinson was a famous scientist. As the head of the University of Oxford’s organic chemistry lab in the 1930s, he’d become known for synthesizing alkaloids and other plant-derived compounds—research that would later be recognized with a knighthood and a Nobel Prize. So it was a surprise to some in the field when, in 1935, Robinson’s findings on the synthesis of physostigmine—a medically important alkaloid derived from Calabar beans and used to treat glaucoma patients since the 1870s—was publicly contested by a relatively unknown researcher on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The challenger was Percy Lavon Julian, a young, Black chemist at DePauw University in Indiana. Born in 1899 in Alabama as the grandson of former slaves, Julian grew up under Jim Crow laws. He’d been one of the first African Americans to earn a PhD in chemistry, something he did at the University of Vienna after Harvard University’s policies stopped him from continuing his education beyond a master’s degree. Now a research fellow at DePauw, he was collaborating with Viennese chemist Josef Pikl on

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A steroid chemist and an entrepreneur, Percy Julian ingeniously figured out how to synthesize important medicinal compounds from abundant plant sources, making them more affordable to mass produce.

In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances—the steroids. These include the sex hormones and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands. The medicinal potential of these compounds was clear, but extracting sufficient quantities of them from animal tissue and fluids was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products, chemists were called upon to mimic nature by creating these steroids in the lab and later by modifying them to make them safer and more effective as drugs.

Chemists found their starting materials in certain plant substances that were also steroids. Percy Lavon Julian (1899–1975) was among the many scientists, including Russell Earl Marker, Carl Djerassi, and George Rosenkranz, who participated actively in the synthesis and large-scale production of steroids from plant compounds.

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Wide Awake and Worlds Away: Percy Lavon Julian’s Scientific Education in Vienna

By Kristina E. Poznan

“Truly I was the luckiest guy in all the world to land here [in Vienna]. For the first time in my life I represent a creative, alive, and wide-awake chemist.”
– Percy L. Julian to Robert Thompson, December 1929 (Afro American, July 30, 1932)

Percy Lavon Julian became the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry when the University of Vienna awarded him his doctorate in 1931. Julian had been born in Alabama and educated at the Lincoln Normal School, DePauw University, and Harvard University. He subsequently taught at Fisk University, West Virginia State College, and Howard University, educating a host of black students in chemistry. While teaching at Howard, Julian earned a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship that enabled him to go to Vienna to complete his studies under Dr. Ernst Späth.[1] The Austrian stamp on Julian’s training and early findings with Universtät Wien classmate Josef Pikl are known and prominently discussed in the NOVA doc