History
Cortisone was first identified by the American chemist Edward Calvin Kendall while a researcher at the Mayo Clinic. He was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Philip S. Hench and Tadeus Reichstein for the discovery of adrenal cortex hormones, their structures, and their functions. Cortisone was first produced commercially by Merck & Co. On September 30, 1949, Percy Julian announced an improvement in the process of producing cortisone from bile acids. This eliminated the need to use osmium tetroxide, a rare, expensive, and dangerous chemical. In the UK in the early 1950s, John Cornforth and Kenneth Callow at the National Institute for Medical Research collaborated with Glaxo to produce cortisone from hecogenin from sisal plants. Unknown at the time of the 1960 Presidential election, President John F. Kennedy took Cortisone supplements to counter the adrenal deficiency symptoms of Addison's Disease, which he denied having.
Read more about this topic: Cortisone
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)