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Was an African American research chemist and pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants.He was the first to synthesize the natural product physotigmine,and a pioneer in the industrial largescale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such stingmasterol and sitosterol.His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of contisone,other corticosteroids,and birth control pills.
Was an African American research chemist and pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants.He was the first to synthesize the natural product physotigmine,and a pioneer in the industrial largescale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such stingmasterol and sitosterol.His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of contisone,other corticosteroids,and birth control pills.
He later started his own company to synthesize steroid intermediates from the wild Mexican yam.His work helped greatly reduce the coast of steroid intermediates to large multinational pharmaceutical companies,helping to significantly expand the use of several important drugs.
He received more than 130 chemical patents.Percy was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry.He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences,and the second African American scientist inducted (behind David Blackwell) from any field.
He was born in Montgomery,Alabama,as the first of six born to James Sumner Julian & Elizabeth Lena Julian nee Adams.Both of his parents were graduates of what was to be Alabama State University.His daddy,whose own daddy had been a slave.Was employed as a clerk in the Railway Service of the United States Post Office,while his mama worked as a schoolteacher.Percy grew up in the time of racist Jim Grow culture and legal regime in the southern United States.Among his childhood memories was finding a lynched man hanging from a tree while walking in the woods near his home.At a time when access to an education beyond the eight grade was extremely rare for African American,Percy's parents steered all of their children toward higher education.
Percy attended De Pauw University in Greencastle,Indiana.The college accepted few African Americans students.The segregated nature of the town forced social humiliations.Percy was not allowed to live in the college dormitories and first stayed in an off campus boarding home,which refused to serve him meals.It took him days before he could find an establishment where he could eat.Julian later found work firing the furnance,waiting tables,and doing odd jobs in a fraternity house; in return,he was allowes to sleep in the attic and eat at the house.Percy graduated from DePauw in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and Valedictorian.By 1930 Percy's daddy would move the entire family to Greencastle so that his children could attend College at DePauw.He still worked as a railroad postal clerk.
After graduating from DePauw,Percy wanted obtain his doctorate in chemistry,he learned that he would be difficult for an African-American to do so.Instead he obtained a position as a chemistry instructor at Fisk University.In 1923 he receive an Austin Fellowship in chemistry,which allowed him to attend Harvard University to obtain his M.S. worried that Euro-American students would resent being taught by an African American,Harvard withdrew Percy's teaching assistantship,making it impossible for him to complete his Ph.D. at Harvard.
In 1929,while an instructor at Howard University,Percy receive a Rockefeller Foundation to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna,where he earned his Ph.D. in 1931. He studied under Ernst Spath and was considered an impressive student.In Europe he found freedom from the racial prejudices that had stiffied him in the States.Percy freely participated in intellectual social gatherings,went to the opera and found greater acceptance among his peers.Percy was one of the first African Americans to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry,after St.Elmo Brady and Dr.Edward M.A. Chandler.
After returning from Vienna,Percy taught for one year at Howard University.At Howard,in part due to his position as a department head,Percy became caught in university politics,setting off an embrassing chain of events.At university president Mordecai Wyatt Johnson's request,he goaded white Professor of chemistry,Jacob Shohan (Ph.D from Harvard), into resigning.In late May 1932, Jacob retaliated by releasing to the local African American newsppers the letters Percy had written to him from Vienna.The letters described "a variety of subjects from wine,pretty Viennese women,music and dances,to chemical experiments plans for the new chemical building.
In the letters,he spoke with familiarity,with some derision,of specific members of the Howard University Faculty,terming one well-known Dean, an "ass."
Around this time,Percy also became entangled in an interpersonal conflict with his laboratory assistant,Robert Thompson.Percy had recommended Robert for dismissal in March 1932.Robert sued Percy for alienating the affections of his wife," Anna Roselle Thompson,stating he had seen them together in a sexual tryst.Percy counter-sued him for libel.When Robert was fired,he too gave the paper intimate and personal letters which had written to him from Vienna,Dr. Percy's letter revealed "how he fooled the [Howard] president into accepting his plans for the chemistry building and " how he bluffed his good friend into appointing" a professor of Percy's liking.Through the summer of 1932,the Baltimore Afro-American published all of Percy's letters.Eventually,the scandal and accompany pressure Percy to resign.He lost his position and everything he had worked for.
Some happiness for Dr.Percy, was to come from this scandal.On December 24,1935 he married Anna Roselle (Ph.D. in Sociology,1937,University of Pennsylvania).They had two children: Percy Lavon Julian, Jr. (August 31,1940-February 24,2008),who became a prestigious civil rights lawyer in Madison,Wisconsin,and Faith Roselle Julian (1944) who still resides in their Oak Park home often makes inspirational speeches about her daddy and his contributions to science.
At his lowest point in his career,Percy former mentor,William Blanchard,threw him a much needed-needed lifeline.William offered Percy a position to teach organic chemistry at DePauw University in 1932.Percy then helped Josef Piki,a fellow student at the University of Vienna,to come to the United States to work with him at DePauw.In 1935 Percy and Josef completed the total synthesis of physotigmine and confirmed the structural formula assigned to it.Robert Robinson of Oxford University in the U.K. had been the first to publish a synthesis of physotigmine,Percy noticed that the melting point of Robert's end product was wrong,indicating that he had not created it.When Percy completed his synthesis,the melting point matched the correct one for natural phyostigmine from the Calabar bean.
Percy also extracted stigmasterol whick took its name Physotigma venenosum which took its name from the west Africa calabar bean that hoped could serve as raw material for synthesis of human steroids hormones.At about,this time,in 1934, Butenandt and Fernholz in Germany,had shown that stigmasterol,isolated from soybean oil,could be converted to progesterone by synthetic organic chemistry.
In 1936,Percy was denied a professorship at DePauw for racial reasons.DuPont had offered a job to fellow chemist Josef Piki but declined to hire Percy, despite his superlative qualifications as an organic chemist,apologizing that they were "unaware he was a Negro." Percy next applied for a job at the Institute of Paper (IPC) in Appleton,Wisconsin.Appleton was a Sundown town,forbidding African Americans from staying overnight, stating directly: "No Negro should be bed or boarded overnight in Appleton."
Meanwhile,Percy had written to the Glidden Company a supplier of soybeans oil products,to to request a five-gallon sample of the oil to use as his starting point for the synthesis of human steroidal sex hormones (in part because his wife was suffering from infertility). After receiving the request,W.J.O'Brien.a vice-president at Glidden,made a telephone call to Percy,offering him the position of director of research at Glidden's Soya Products Division in Chicago. He was very likely offered the job by W.J. because he was fluent in German,and Glidden had just purchased a modern continuous countercurrent solvent extraction plant from Germany for the extraction of vegetable oil from soybeans for paints and other uses.
Percy supervised the assembly of the plant at Glidden when he arrived in 1936.He then designed and supervised construction of the world's first plant for the production of industrial grade,isolated soy protein from oil-free soybean meal.Isolated soy protein could replace the more expensive milk casein in industrial applications such as coating and sizing,of paper,glue for making Douglas fir plywood,and in manfacture of water-based paints.
At the start of World War II,Glidden sent a sample of Percy's isolated soy protein to National Foam System Inc. (today a unit Kiddle Fire Fighting),which used it to develop Aero-O-Foam,the U.S. Navy's beloved fire-fighting "bean soup." While it was not exactly Percy's brainchild,meticulous care in the preparation of the soy protein made the fire fighting foam possible.When a hydrolysate of isolated soy protein was fed into a water stream,the mixture was converted into a foam by means of an aerating nozzle.The soy protein foam was used to smother oil and gas fires aboard ships and was particularly useful on aircraft carriers.It saved the lives of thousands of sailors and airmen.Citing this achievement,in 1947 the NAACP awarded Percy the Spingarn Medal,its highest honor.
Percy's research at Glidden changed direction in 1940 when he began work on synthesizing progesterone,and testosterone from the plant sterols stigmasterol and sitosterol,isolated from soybean oil by a foam technique he invented and patented.At that time clinicians were discovering many uses for the newly discovered hormones.However, one minute quantities could be extracted from hundreds of pounds of the spinal cords of animals.
In 1940 Percy was able to produce 100 lb of mixed soy sterols daily,which a value of $10,000 ($ 79,000 today) as sex hormones.Percy was soon ozonizing 100 pounds daily of mixed sterol dibromides.The soy stigmasterol was easily converted into commercial quantities of the female hormone progesterone,and the first pound of progesterone he made,valued at $63,500 ($503,000 today),was shipped to the buyer,Upjohn,in an armed car.Production of other sex hormones soon followed.
His work made possible the production of these hormones on a large industrial scale,with the potential of reducing the cost of treating hormonal deficiencies.Percy and his coworkers obtained patents for Glidden on key processes for preparation of progesterone and testosterone from soybean plants sterols. Product patents held by a former cartel of European pharmaceutical companies had prevented a significant reduction in wholesale and retail prices for clinical use of these hormones in the 1940s.He saved many lives with this discovery.
On April 13,1949,rheumatologist Philip Hench at the Mayo Clinic announced the dramatic effectiveness of cortisone in treating rheumatold arthritis.The cortisone was produced by Merck at great expense using a complex 36-step synthesis developed by chemist Lewis Sarett,starting with deoxycholic acid from cattle bile acids.On September 30,1949,Percy announced an improvement in the process of producing cortisone.This eliminated the need to use osmium tetroxide,which was a rare and expensive chemical.By 1950,Glidden could begin producing closely related compounds which might have partial cortisone activity.Percy also announced the synthesis,starting with the cheap and readily available pregnenolone (synthesized from soybean oil sterol stigmasterol) of the steroid cortexolone (also known as Reichstein's Substance S),a molecule that differed from cortisone by a single oxygen atom; and possibly 17a-hydroxyprogesterone and pregnenetriolone,which he hoped might also be effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis,unfortunately they were not.
On April 5,1952,biochemist Durley Peterson and microbiologist Herbert Murray at Upjohn published the first report of a fermentation process for the microbial 11a-hydroxycortisone from progesterone or Compound S,respectively,which could then by further chemical steps be converted to cortisone 11-hydroxprogesterone or 11a-hydroxycortisone from progesterone or Compound S,respectively,which could then by further chemical steps be converted to cortisone or 11-hydroxycortisone (cortisol).
After two years,Glidden abandoned production of cortisone concentrate on Substance S.Percy developed a multistep process for conversion of pregnenolone,available in abundance from soybean oil sterols,to cortexolone.In 1952,Glidden,which had been producing progesterone and other steroids from soybean oil,shut down its own production and began importing them from Mexico through an arrangement with Diosynth (a small Mexican company founded in 1947 by Russell Marker after leaving Syntex).Glidden's cost of production of cortexolone was relatively,high,Upjohn decided to use progesterone,available in large quantity at low cost from Syntex,to produce cortisone and hydrocortisone.
In 1953,Glidden decided to leave the steroid business,which had been realtivively uprofitable over the years despite Percy's innovative work.On December 1,1953,Percy left Glidden after 18 years,giving up a salary of nearly $50,000 a year (equivalent to $ 440,000 in 2015) to found his own company,Julian Laboratories,inc.,taking over the small,concrete-block building of Suburban Chemical Company in Franklin Park Illinois.
On December 2,1953 Pfizer acquired exclusive licenses of Glidden patents for the synthesis S. Pfizer had developed a ferment process for microbial 11 oxygenation of teroids in a single step that could convert Substance S. directly to 11-hydrocortisone (cortisol),with Syntex undertaking large-scale production of cortexolone at very low cost.
Circa 1950,Percy moved his family to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park,becoming the first African American family to reside there.Although some residents welcomed them into the community,there was also opposition.Before they even moved in,on Thanksgiving Day,1950,their home was fire bombed.Later after they moved in,the house was attacked with dynamite on June 12,1951.The attacks galvanized the community,and a community was formed to support the Julians.Percy's son later recounted that during these times,he and his daddy often kept watch over the family's property by sitting in a tree with a shotgun.
In 1953,Percy founded his own research firm,Julian Laboratories,Inc.He brought many of his best chemists,including African Americans and women,from Glidden to his own company.Percy won a contract to provide Upjohn with $ million worth of progesterone (equivalent to $16 million today).To complete against syntax,he would have to use the same Mexican yam Mexican barbasco trade as his starting material.Percy used his own money and borrowed from friends to build a processing plant in Mexico,he could not get a permit from the government to harvest yams.Abraham Ziotnik,a former Jewish University of Vienna classmate whom Percy had helped escape from the Nazi European holocaust,led a search to find a new source of the yam in Guatemala for the company.
In July 1956,Percy and executives of two other American companies trying to enter the Mexican steroid intermediates market appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee.They testified that Syntex was using undue influence to monopolized access to the Mexican yam.The hearings resulted in Syntex signing a consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department.While it did not admit to restraining trade,it promised not do so in the future.Whithin five years,years large American multinational pharmaceutical companies had acquired all six producers of steroids intermediates in Mexico,four of which had been Mexican-owned.
Syntex reduced the cost of steroid intermediates more than 250-fold over twelve years,from $80per gram in 1943-$o.31 per gram in 1955.Competition from Upjohn and General Mills,which had together made very substantial in the production of progesterone from stigmasterol,forced the price of Mexican progesterone to less than $.15 per gram in 1957.The price continued to fall,bottoming out at $0.08 per gram in 1968.
In 1958,Upjohn purchased 6,900 Kg of progesterone from Syntex at $0.135 per gram.6,201 Kg of progesterone from Searle (who had acquired Pesa) at $.143 per gram,5.150 kg of progesterone from Julian Laboratories at $0.14 per gram,and 1,925 kg of progesterone from General Mills (who had acquired Protex) at $.142 per gram.
Julian Laboratories chemists found a way to quadruple the yield on a product on which they were barely breaking even.Julian reduced their price for the product from $4,000 per kg to $400 per kg.He sold the company in 1961 for $2.3 million (equivalent to $18 million today).The U.S. and Mexican facilities were purchased by Smith Kline,and Julian's chemical plant Guatemala was purchased by Upjohn.
In 1964,Percy founded Julian Associates and Julian Research Institute,which he managed for the rest of his life.
He received more than 130 chemical patents.Percy was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry.He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences,and the second African American scientist inducted (behind David Blackwell) from any field.
He was born in Montgomery,Alabama,as the first of six born to James Sumner Julian & Elizabeth Lena Julian nee Adams.Both of his parents were graduates of what was to be Alabama State University.His daddy,whose own daddy had been a slave.Was employed as a clerk in the Railway Service of the United States Post Office,while his mama worked as a schoolteacher.Percy grew up in the time of racist Jim Grow culture and legal regime in the southern United States.Among his childhood memories was finding a lynched man hanging from a tree while walking in the woods near his home.At a time when access to an education beyond the eight grade was extremely rare for African American,Percy's parents steered all of their children toward higher education.
Percy attended De Pauw University in Greencastle,Indiana.The college accepted few African Americans students.The segregated nature of the town forced social humiliations.Percy was not allowed to live in the college dormitories and first stayed in an off campus boarding home,which refused to serve him meals.It took him days before he could find an establishment where he could eat.Julian later found work firing the furnance,waiting tables,and doing odd jobs in a fraternity house; in return,he was allowes to sleep in the attic and eat at the house.Percy graduated from DePauw in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and Valedictorian.By 1930 Percy's daddy would move the entire family to Greencastle so that his children could attend College at DePauw.He still worked as a railroad postal clerk.
After graduating from DePauw,Percy wanted obtain his doctorate in chemistry,he learned that he would be difficult for an African-American to do so.Instead he obtained a position as a chemistry instructor at Fisk University.In 1923 he receive an Austin Fellowship in chemistry,which allowed him to attend Harvard University to obtain his M.S. worried that Euro-American students would resent being taught by an African American,Harvard withdrew Percy's teaching assistantship,making it impossible for him to complete his Ph.D. at Harvard.
In 1929,while an instructor at Howard University,Percy receive a Rockefeller Foundation to continue his graduate work at the University of Vienna,where he earned his Ph.D. in 1931. He studied under Ernst Spath and was considered an impressive student.In Europe he found freedom from the racial prejudices that had stiffied him in the States.Percy freely participated in intellectual social gatherings,went to the opera and found greater acceptance among his peers.Percy was one of the first African Americans to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry,after St.Elmo Brady and Dr.Edward M.A. Chandler.
After returning from Vienna,Percy taught for one year at Howard University.At Howard,in part due to his position as a department head,Percy became caught in university politics,setting off an embrassing chain of events.At university president Mordecai Wyatt Johnson's request,he goaded white Professor of chemistry,Jacob Shohan (Ph.D from Harvard), into resigning.In late May 1932, Jacob retaliated by releasing to the local African American newsppers the letters Percy had written to him from Vienna.The letters described "a variety of subjects from wine,pretty Viennese women,music and dances,to chemical experiments plans for the new chemical building.
In the letters,he spoke with familiarity,with some derision,of specific members of the Howard University Faculty,terming one well-known Dean, an "ass."
Around this time,Percy also became entangled in an interpersonal conflict with his laboratory assistant,Robert Thompson.Percy had recommended Robert for dismissal in March 1932.Robert sued Percy for alienating the affections of his wife," Anna Roselle Thompson,stating he had seen them together in a sexual tryst.Percy counter-sued him for libel.When Robert was fired,he too gave the paper intimate and personal letters which had written to him from Vienna,Dr. Percy's letter revealed "how he fooled the [Howard] president into accepting his plans for the chemistry building and " how he bluffed his good friend into appointing" a professor of Percy's liking.Through the summer of 1932,the Baltimore Afro-American published all of Percy's letters.Eventually,the scandal and accompany pressure Percy to resign.He lost his position and everything he had worked for.
Some happiness for Dr.Percy, was to come from this scandal.On December 24,1935 he married Anna Roselle (Ph.D. in Sociology,1937,University of Pennsylvania).They had two children: Percy Lavon Julian, Jr. (August 31,1940-February 24,2008),who became a prestigious civil rights lawyer in Madison,Wisconsin,and Faith Roselle Julian (1944) who still resides in their Oak Park home often makes inspirational speeches about her daddy and his contributions to science.
At his lowest point in his career,Percy former mentor,William Blanchard,threw him a much needed-needed lifeline.William offered Percy a position to teach organic chemistry at DePauw University in 1932.Percy then helped Josef Piki,a fellow student at the University of Vienna,to come to the United States to work with him at DePauw.In 1935 Percy and Josef completed the total synthesis of physotigmine and confirmed the structural formula assigned to it.Robert Robinson of Oxford University in the U.K. had been the first to publish a synthesis of physotigmine,Percy noticed that the melting point of Robert's end product was wrong,indicating that he had not created it.When Percy completed his synthesis,the melting point matched the correct one for natural phyostigmine from the Calabar bean.
Percy also extracted stigmasterol whick took its name Physotigma venenosum which took its name from the west Africa calabar bean that hoped could serve as raw material for synthesis of human steroids hormones.At about,this time,in 1934, Butenandt and Fernholz in Germany,had shown that stigmasterol,isolated from soybean oil,could be converted to progesterone by synthetic organic chemistry.
In 1936,Percy was denied a professorship at DePauw for racial reasons.DuPont had offered a job to fellow chemist Josef Piki but declined to hire Percy, despite his superlative qualifications as an organic chemist,apologizing that they were "unaware he was a Negro." Percy next applied for a job at the Institute of Paper (IPC) in Appleton,Wisconsin.Appleton was a Sundown town,forbidding African Americans from staying overnight, stating directly: "No Negro should be bed or boarded overnight in Appleton."
Meanwhile,Percy had written to the Glidden Company a supplier of soybeans oil products,to to request a five-gallon sample of the oil to use as his starting point for the synthesis of human steroidal sex hormones (in part because his wife was suffering from infertility). After receiving the request,W.J.O'Brien.a vice-president at Glidden,made a telephone call to Percy,offering him the position of director of research at Glidden's Soya Products Division in Chicago. He was very likely offered the job by W.J. because he was fluent in German,and Glidden had just purchased a modern continuous countercurrent solvent extraction plant from Germany for the extraction of vegetable oil from soybeans for paints and other uses.
Percy supervised the assembly of the plant at Glidden when he arrived in 1936.He then designed and supervised construction of the world's first plant for the production of industrial grade,isolated soy protein from oil-free soybean meal.Isolated soy protein could replace the more expensive milk casein in industrial applications such as coating and sizing,of paper,glue for making Douglas fir plywood,and in manfacture of water-based paints.
At the start of World War II,Glidden sent a sample of Percy's isolated soy protein to National Foam System Inc. (today a unit Kiddle Fire Fighting),which used it to develop Aero-O-Foam,the U.S. Navy's beloved fire-fighting "bean soup." While it was not exactly Percy's brainchild,meticulous care in the preparation of the soy protein made the fire fighting foam possible.When a hydrolysate of isolated soy protein was fed into a water stream,the mixture was converted into a foam by means of an aerating nozzle.The soy protein foam was used to smother oil and gas fires aboard ships and was particularly useful on aircraft carriers.It saved the lives of thousands of sailors and airmen.Citing this achievement,in 1947 the NAACP awarded Percy the Spingarn Medal,its highest honor.
Percy's research at Glidden changed direction in 1940 when he began work on synthesizing progesterone,and testosterone from the plant sterols stigmasterol and sitosterol,isolated from soybean oil by a foam technique he invented and patented.At that time clinicians were discovering many uses for the newly discovered hormones.However, one minute quantities could be extracted from hundreds of pounds of the spinal cords of animals.
In 1940 Percy was able to produce 100 lb of mixed soy sterols daily,which a value of $10,000 ($ 79,000 today) as sex hormones.Percy was soon ozonizing 100 pounds daily of mixed sterol dibromides.The soy stigmasterol was easily converted into commercial quantities of the female hormone progesterone,and the first pound of progesterone he made,valued at $63,500 ($503,000 today),was shipped to the buyer,Upjohn,in an armed car.Production of other sex hormones soon followed.
His work made possible the production of these hormones on a large industrial scale,with the potential of reducing the cost of treating hormonal deficiencies.Percy and his coworkers obtained patents for Glidden on key processes for preparation of progesterone and testosterone from soybean plants sterols. Product patents held by a former cartel of European pharmaceutical companies had prevented a significant reduction in wholesale and retail prices for clinical use of these hormones in the 1940s.He saved many lives with this discovery.
On April 13,1949,rheumatologist Philip Hench at the Mayo Clinic announced the dramatic effectiveness of cortisone in treating rheumatold arthritis.The cortisone was produced by Merck at great expense using a complex 36-step synthesis developed by chemist Lewis Sarett,starting with deoxycholic acid from cattle bile acids.On September 30,1949,Percy announced an improvement in the process of producing cortisone.This eliminated the need to use osmium tetroxide,which was a rare and expensive chemical.By 1950,Glidden could begin producing closely related compounds which might have partial cortisone activity.Percy also announced the synthesis,starting with the cheap and readily available pregnenolone (synthesized from soybean oil sterol stigmasterol) of the steroid cortexolone (also known as Reichstein's Substance S),a molecule that differed from cortisone by a single oxygen atom; and possibly 17a-hydroxyprogesterone and pregnenetriolone,which he hoped might also be effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis,unfortunately they were not.
On April 5,1952,biochemist Durley Peterson and microbiologist Herbert Murray at Upjohn published the first report of a fermentation process for the microbial 11a-hydroxycortisone from progesterone or Compound S,respectively,which could then by further chemical steps be converted to cortisone 11-hydroxprogesterone or 11a-hydroxycortisone from progesterone or Compound S,respectively,which could then by further chemical steps be converted to cortisone or 11-hydroxycortisone (cortisol).
After two years,Glidden abandoned production of cortisone concentrate on Substance S.Percy developed a multistep process for conversion of pregnenolone,available in abundance from soybean oil sterols,to cortexolone.In 1952,Glidden,which had been producing progesterone and other steroids from soybean oil,shut down its own production and began importing them from Mexico through an arrangement with Diosynth (a small Mexican company founded in 1947 by Russell Marker after leaving Syntex).Glidden's cost of production of cortexolone was relatively,high,Upjohn decided to use progesterone,available in large quantity at low cost from Syntex,to produce cortisone and hydrocortisone.
In 1953,Glidden decided to leave the steroid business,which had been realtivively uprofitable over the years despite Percy's innovative work.On December 1,1953,Percy left Glidden after 18 years,giving up a salary of nearly $50,000 a year (equivalent to $ 440,000 in 2015) to found his own company,Julian Laboratories,inc.,taking over the small,concrete-block building of Suburban Chemical Company in Franklin Park Illinois.
On December 2,1953 Pfizer acquired exclusive licenses of Glidden patents for the synthesis S. Pfizer had developed a ferment process for microbial 11 oxygenation of teroids in a single step that could convert Substance S. directly to 11-hydrocortisone (cortisol),with Syntex undertaking large-scale production of cortexolone at very low cost.
Circa 1950,Percy moved his family to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park,becoming the first African American family to reside there.Although some residents welcomed them into the community,there was also opposition.Before they even moved in,on Thanksgiving Day,1950,their home was fire bombed.Later after they moved in,the house was attacked with dynamite on June 12,1951.The attacks galvanized the community,and a community was formed to support the Julians.Percy's son later recounted that during these times,he and his daddy often kept watch over the family's property by sitting in a tree with a shotgun.
In 1953,Percy founded his own research firm,Julian Laboratories,Inc.He brought many of his best chemists,including African Americans and women,from Glidden to his own company.Percy won a contract to provide Upjohn with $ million worth of progesterone (equivalent to $16 million today).To complete against syntax,he would have to use the same Mexican yam Mexican barbasco trade as his starting material.Percy used his own money and borrowed from friends to build a processing plant in Mexico,he could not get a permit from the government to harvest yams.Abraham Ziotnik,a former Jewish University of Vienna classmate whom Percy had helped escape from the Nazi European holocaust,led a search to find a new source of the yam in Guatemala for the company.
In July 1956,Percy and executives of two other American companies trying to enter the Mexican steroid intermediates market appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee.They testified that Syntex was using undue influence to monopolized access to the Mexican yam.The hearings resulted in Syntex signing a consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department.While it did not admit to restraining trade,it promised not do so in the future.Whithin five years,years large American multinational pharmaceutical companies had acquired all six producers of steroids intermediates in Mexico,four of which had been Mexican-owned.
Syntex reduced the cost of steroid intermediates more than 250-fold over twelve years,from $80per gram in 1943-$o.31 per gram in 1955.Competition from Upjohn and General Mills,which had together made very substantial in the production of progesterone from stigmasterol,forced the price of Mexican progesterone to less than $.15 per gram in 1957.The price continued to fall,bottoming out at $0.08 per gram in 1968.
In 1958,Upjohn purchased 6,900 Kg of progesterone from Syntex at $0.135 per gram.6,201 Kg of progesterone from Searle (who had acquired Pesa) at $.143 per gram,5.150 kg of progesterone from Julian Laboratories at $0.14 per gram,and 1,925 kg of progesterone from General Mills (who had acquired Protex) at $.142 per gram.
Julian Laboratories chemists found a way to quadruple the yield on a product on which they were barely breaking even.Julian reduced their price for the product from $4,000 per kg to $400 per kg.He sold the company in 1961 for $2.3 million (equivalent to $18 million today).The U.S. and Mexican facilities were purchased by Smith Kline,and Julian's chemical plant Guatemala was purchased by Upjohn.
In 1964,Percy founded Julian Associates and Julian Research Institute,which he managed for the rest of his life.
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