Encyclopedia Of Detroit

Carl Djerassi was born October 29, 1923 in Vienna, Austria. His parents divorced when he was young and his father moved to Bulgaria. In 1938 they briefly remarried to allow Carl and his mother to flee to Bulgaria to escape the Nazi regime. In the 1940s, Djerassi and his mother came to the United States from Bulgaria with very little money. He studied chemistry at Kenyon College and received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin.

After earning his PhD, Djerassi quickly made a name for himself, patenting the first commercially successful antihistamine while working for CIBA in New Jersey. This invention helped him get a position with the Syntex Corporation in Mexico City. In 1951, Djerassi oversaw a team of researchers that were synthesizing the norethindrone hormone, which became the last piece in the creation of the first oral contraceptive for birth control.

Djerassi’s early work with the hormone norethindrone was not intended to have any effect on contraceptives, but through his research he found that the results could be effectively applied. It was during his time as a professor of chemistry at Wayne State University from 1952 to 1959 that the birth control pill started to make him both famous and wealthy. After 1959, Carl Djerassi left Detroit and went back to Syntex, this time as president. Besides his lasting work in the field of chemistry, Djerassi is also an accomplished author and playwright. Djerassi’s work is still being applied and perfected today in a society that relies on oral contraceptives.