Carl Djerassi - Career

Career

Djerassi worked for CIBA in New Jersey, developing Pyribenzamine (tripelenamine), his first patent and the first commercial antihistamine.

In 1949 Djerassi became associate director of research at Syntex in Mexico City and remained there through 1951. 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 (COCPs). COCPs became known colloquially as the birth-control pill, or simply, the Pill. From 1952-1959 he was a faculty member of Wayne State University's Chemistry department in Detroit.

In 1959 Djerassi became a professor of chemistry at Stanford University and the president of Syntex Laboratories in Mexico City and Palo Alto, California. The Syntex connection brought wealth to Djerassi. He bought a large tract of land in Woodside, California, started a cattle ranch, and assembled a large art collection. He started a new company, Zoecon, which focused on pest control without insecticides, using modified insect growth hormones to stop insects from metamorphosing from the larval stage to the pupal and adult stages. He sold Zoecon to Occidental Petroleum, which later sold it to Sandoz. Part of Zoecon survives in Dallas, Texas, making products to control fleas and other pests.

In 1965 at Stanford University, bacterial geneticist Joshua Lederberg, computer scientist Edward Feigenbaum, and Djerassi devised the computer program DENDRAL (dendritic algorithm) for the elucidation of the molecular structure of unknown organic compounds taken from known groups of such compounds, such as the alkaloids and the steroids. This was a prototype for expert systems and the first use of artificial intelligence in biomedical research.

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.