Professor Hamamoto - Unmasking Carl Djerassi: Father of “Birth Control” Pill

Wikipedia:

Carl Djerassi (October 29, 1923 – January 30, 2015) was an Austrian-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”.

. . .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. From 1952 to 1959, Djerassi was professor of chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit.

He participated in the invention in 1951, together with Mexican Luis E. Miramontes and Hungarian-Mexican George Rosenkranz, of the progestin norethisterone—which, unlike progesterone, remained effective when taken orally and was far stronger than the naturally occurring hormone. Djerassi’s preparation was first administered as an oral contraceptive to animals by Gregory Goodwin Pincus and Min Chueh Chang and to women by John Rock.

In 1957, Djerassi became vice president of research at Syntex in Mexico City while on leave of absence from Wayne State. In 1960, he became a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, a position he held until 2002[16] but only part-time, as he never left industry. From 1968 until 1972, he also served as president of Syntex Research at Palo Alto.

. . .Djerassi described himself as a “Jewish atheist”.

Video Title: Unmasking Carl Djerassi: Father of “Birth Control” Pill. Source: Professor Hamamoto. Date Published: March 8, 2026.