Developer of 'the pill' dies

Developer of 'the pill' dies

WORLD

VIENNA - Carl Djerassi changed the lives of women around the world by helping to develop oral contraceptives.

But the Vienna-born chemist's talents stretched beyond the laboratory. He also wrote novels and plays, collected art and supported young artists. Djerassi died on Friday night in San Francisco at the age of 91.

Djerassi was born in 1923, the son of Jewish doctors. When Adolf Hitler annexed Austria to Germany in 1938, Djerassi first fled to Bulgaria, where his father came from, and later to the United States.

As money was tight for the young immigrant, he wrote a letter to then US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt seeking her help in getting a scholarship.

Carl Djerassi downplayed the impact of "the pill", saying couples were also having fewer children for social, economic and cultural reasons. (EPA Photo)

He studied chemistry, a field in which he earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1945.

In the course of his scientific career, Djerassi published some 1,200 studies, including on the synthetic production of the hormone cortisone.

While working with the pharmaceutical company Syntex in Mexico, he and several colleagues managed to synthesise the hormone progestogen, from which the first oral contraceptive was developed a few years later.

"The pill" has not only been credited with letting women take control over their bodies and lives, but also with a significant drop in births in industrial countries in the 1960s.

However, Djerassi denied that his discovery led to the decrease.

"That's nonsense. Couples decide to have few children for social, economic and cultural reasons," he once said.

The next decades would not be marked by contraception, but by reproductive medicine, he predicted.

"One will concentrate on how one can have a child, rather than on preventing it," he told Austrian broadcaster ORF.

Later in life, he was annoyed that journalists kept asking him about the pill, and not about his other important developments in the fields of antihistamines, used for treating asthma, and corticosteroids, which are used against inflammation.

Inspired by his third wife, the feminist Stanford scholar and poet Diane Middlebrook, Djerassi started writing poems, short stories, novels and dramas.

His 1989 novel Cantor's Dilemma described the vanity and trickery involved in a scientist's quest to win a Nobel price.

Although he received many scientific awards, Djerassi never won Nobel laurels.

"There are many people who deserve a Nobel Prize but never get one," he told the Austrian daily Die Presse last year, when asked whether he considered himself a candidate.

While Djerassi's career was successful, he had to face personal tragedies. Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007. His daughter Pamela committed suicide some 30 years earlier.

In her memory, Djerassi founded a centre on his farm in California where young painters, sculptors, writers and photographers can work for free for a year.

Djerassi was also an avid art collector. He donated half of his sizeable collections of paintings by Paul Klee to the Albertina museum in Vienna in 2008.

He said at the time: "My feelings for Vienna will remain mixed all my life, although they get better and better."

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