Carl Djerassi - Early Life

Early Life

Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna, Austria. His mother was Alice Friedmann, an Ashkenazi Viennese Jew with roots in Galicia, and his father was Dr. Samuel Djerassi, a Bulgarian Sephardic Jew. Samuel Djerassi was a physician who specialized in treating syphilis with the existing arsenical drugs. His successful practice in Sofia was limited to a few wealthy patients, whose treatment lasted for years.

Following his parents' divorce, Djerassi and his mother moved to Vienna to take advantage of the better school system. Until age fourteen, he attended the same realgymnasium that Sigmund Freud had attended many years earlier; he spent summers in Bulgaria with his father. After the Anschluss, his father briefly remarried his mother in 1938 to allow Carl to escape the Nazi regime and flee to Bulgaria, where he lived with his father for a year. During his time in Bulgaria, Djerassi attended the American College of Sofia. A few years later, Djerassi arrived with his mother in the United States, nearly penniless—they had only $20 in their pockets, which was swindled from them by a taxicab driver. Djerassi's mother worked in a group practice in upstate New York. In 1949 his father emigrated to the United States and eventually settled near his son in San Francisco.

Djerassi briefly attended Tarkio College (now defunct), then studied chemistry at Kenyon College, which is famous for literary criticism and the Kenyon Review. He graduated summa cum laude. In 1945, he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin.