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Carl Djerassi (born October 29, 1923 in Vienna, Austria), is a chemist, novelist, and playwright best known for his contribution to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill (OCP). He participated in the invention in 1951, together with Mexican Luis E. Miramontes and Hungarian George Rosenkranz, of the progestin norethindrone—which, unlike progesterone, remained effective when taken orally and was far stronger than the naturally occurring hormone. His preparation was first administered as an oral contraceptive to animals by Gregory Pincus and Min Chueh Chang and to women by John Rock. His other achievements include important contributions to the development of synthetic cortisone and herbicides. After his scientific career, Djerassi gained additional fame as a collector of Paul Klee, art patron and writer. He invented the genre of science-in-fiction, portraying the work of scientists and their tribal culture in a tetralogy of novels. He successfully managed to transfer this genre to the stage in various plays. Djerassi lives in San Francisco and London.

Childhood and Emigration
Carl Djerassi was born as the only child of physicians Samuel Djerassi, a Bulgarian Sephardic Jew, and Alice Friedmann, an Austrian Ashkenazi Jew. Djerassi lived in Bulgaria with his parents until he was five. He and his mother then moved to Vienna, enabling Djerassi to attend Gymnasium while spending summers in Bulgaria with his father, who had divorced his mother. After the Austrian Anschluss to Nazi Germany, his father briefly remarried his mother to allow Carl to escape the Holocaust. They fled to Bulgaria in 1938, where he lived with his father for a year. He attended the American College of Sofia and perfected his fluency in English while his mother went to England to await a visa to emigrate to the United States. In 1939, the 16-year-old Djerassi arrived in the United States with his mother, nearly penniless. The trauma of emigration and the feeling of “not belonging” anywhere influenced his later literary work.

Djerassi attended Newark Junior College (now defunct) in New Jersey, which completed his high-school education. He then went on to Tarkio College (now defunct) in Missouri and Kenyon College, Ohio.

Achievements in chemistry
Djerassi graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Kenyon College (B.A. in organic chemistry, 1942). He worked for Ciba the year before and four years after his graduate studies. At Ciba, he got his first patent, for the antihistamine Pyribenzamine, which became a popular prescription drug. He married his first wife, Virginia, an American, in 1943 before beginning graduate study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1945. He became an American citizen in 1945.

In 1949, he was recruited to be the associate director of research at Syntex in Mexico City by then-technical director George Rosenkranz, and worked there from 1950-1951. At Syntex, he worked on a new synthesis of cortisone based on diosgenin, a steroid sapogenin derived from a Mexican wild yam; then his team synthesized norethindrone, a progestin-analogue that was effective when taken by mouth. This became part of the first successful oral contraceptive, the combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP). COCPs became known colloquially as the birth-control pill, or simply, the Pill. From 1952 to 1959, Djerassi taught chemistry at Wayne State University. He returned to Syntex from 1957 to 1960, while on a leave of absence from Wayne State.

Djerassi remarked that he did not have birth control in mind when he began working with progesterone — "not in our wildest dreams… did we imagine (it)" — though he is now referred to by some as the father of the pill. He himself prefers the term “Mother of the Pill”, associating chemistry with female qualities in opposition to “male” biology.

Since 1959, Djerassi has been a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and the president of Syntex Laboratories in Mexico City and later in Palo Alto, California. He later started a company called Zoecon, which used modified insect growth hormones to control fleas, and other insect pests. Zoecon flourished for a few decades and then was bought and swallowed by Occidental Petroleum: For a few years, Djerassi was on the board of directors of Occidental Petroleum. Zoecon's products were widely sold in the 1980s; they are still made and marketed by Wellmark International. His developments in the field of insecticides earned Djerassi the highest recognition within the scientific community.

Patronage of Arts
Djerassi is a leading collector of the works of Paul Klee, owning about 180 pictures, especially from Klee’s early period. His pieces are frequently exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to which he has bequeathed half his collection. The other half will go to the Albertina in his birthplace Vienna where his collection was on show in a special exhibition in summer 2008.

With his second wife, Norma Lundholm, he had a son, Dale, who is a documentary filmmaker; and a daughter, Pamela, who grew up to become an artist. She was married to a doctor, who was doing a residency at Stanford. She suffered from chronic pain as well as depression and took a fatal overdose of prescription drugs in July of 1978. After Pamela's suicide, Djerassi founded the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (DRAP) in her memory.

Literary work
Since the early 1980s, Djerassi became increasingly interested in expressing himself through literature. He soon started to publish poems and short stories. Since his official retirement from chemical research in 1988, Djerassi has devoted much of his energy to literature.

Djerassi was married to his third wife, biographer and Stanford professor emerita Diane Middlebrook, from 1985 until her death in December 2007. Middlebrook consulted Djerassi with his literary efforts and contributed largely to his works.

Djerassi’s works have been translated into many languages. He supervises the translation of his works into German personally. He has published many of his works in German first to test their reception before finishing the English edition

Science-in-Fiction
Djerassi has coined the term science-in-fiction. Unlike science fiction, he aims to shed light on the work and behaviour of factual, present-day scientists and make their discoveries, their methods and their tribal culture known to a larger public. His attitude towards the natural sciences is a very self-critical one as he often questions ethical violations that his fellow scientists commit. In the tradition of Charles Percy Snow (The Physicists), he attempts to break down artificial boundaries between natural sciences and the arts and start a new dialogue between these two academic fields.

The major topics of his science-in-fiction novels are the quality of the mentor-disciple relationship, trust in the reliability of scientific results and the drive for scientific priority. Djerassi, a self-declared feminist, also adds many strong female characters as protagonists to the traditionally male-dominated sciences. He also emphasizes that he does not aim to be didactic. Most of the novels and plays leave the decision whether new technologies are a blessing or a curse to the audience.

Djerassi’s science-in-fiction novels form a tetralogy, starting with Cantor’s Dilemma (1989), which is based on an earlier short story. Encouraged by the reception of the novel, he followed up with The Bourbaki Gambit (1994), which deals even more intensively with aspects of the scientists’ tribal culture, such as their struggle for recognition and against ageism. The third instalment, Menachem’s Seed (1996), contains an unconventional lovestory and drew attention for Djerassi’s description of female masturbation. In the last part of the tetralogy, NO (1998), many of the previous characters are brought together and introduces the reader into the world of pharmaceutical marketing

Science-in-Theater
Since the late 2000s, Djerassi has become increasingly fascinated by the theatre. His first play, An Immaculate Misconception (premiered 1998), is an adaptation of his novel Menachem’s Seed and transfers science-in-fiction on the stage. His first independent play was Oxygen (2001; together with Roald Hoffmann), followed by Calculus (2003). Both plays present well-researched views into controversies from the history of science. Djerassi attempts to demystify great chemists of the past such as Isaac Newton or Antoine Lavoisier and show that they were only human beings with their flaws and talents, obeying the rules of the same tribal culture as today’s scientists.

The conflict between natural science and the arts is taken up again in the comedy Phallacy (2005), where the dispute over the authenticity of an ancient statue leads to a romantic reconciliation between art and physics. Taboos (2006) drastically shows the consequences of living in the “age of mechanical reproduction”, where artificial insemination and intracytoplasmic sperm injection are no longer science fiction. But Djerassi displays chances and dangers of the new technologies equally, leaving the audience to form their own opinion.

Other literary work
Already in the 1990s, Djerassi briefly abandoned science-in-fiction to write Marx, Deceased (1996). Instead of a scientist, the protagonist is a creative writer. But Djerassi manages to outline similarities in the behaviour of both “tribes”; the struggle for scientific priority is presented as equal to the quest for fame and publication among authors. Djerassi adapted parts of Marx, Deceased for his play EGO, later renamed Three on a Couch (premiered 2003).

In 2008, Djerassi opened up a whole new direction with his docudrama Four Jews on Parnassus. It is based on extensive biographical research and describes a fictional meeting of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem and Arnold Schoenberg in the afterlife. These four important Jews of the 20th century discuss questions of literary canonization, Jewish identity, art and music.

Awards and honors
Djerassi was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Nixon for his work on the Pill. In 1975 he was awarded the Perkin Medal.

In 1978, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The first Wolf Prize in Chemistry was awarded to him in 1978.

In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for "his broad technological contributions to solving environmental problems; and for his initiatives in developing novel, practical approaches to insect control products that are biodegradable and harmless." In 1992 he was awarded the Priestley Medal.

Austria has issued a postage stamp with Djerassi's picture on it. The Austrian government also sent him a new Austrian passport. He was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Art and Science, First Class in 1999.

Djerassi is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is chairman of the Pharmanex Scientific Advisory Board.

Djerassi is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and many others. He currently holds 20 honorary doctorates from universities from all over the world.

German University TU Dortmund will honour him by holding the first symposium on his literary works in April 2009.