Percy Lavon Julian, the grandson of an enslaved man, left segregated Alabama with an eighth-grade education and became one of the most productive industrial chemists of his century. His 1935 synthesis of the glaucoma drug physostigmine won him international standing, and his work turning soybean and yam sterols into hormones and cortisone precursors helped make steroid medicines cheap and widely available. He did it while universities refused to hire him and neighbors bombed his home.
At a Glance
- Born
- 11 April 1899, Montgomery, Alabama
- Died
- 19 April 1975, Waukegan, Illinois
- Birth name
- Percy Lavon Julian
- Known for
- Total synthesis of physostigmine (1935); industrial production of steroid hormones from soybean sterols at Glidden (1936–54); Julian Laboratories; election to the National Academy of Sciences (1973)
- HBCU ties
- Fisk University (Taught chemistry, 1920–1922); West Virginia State University (Professor of chemistry, 1926–1927); Howard University (Head of the chemistry department from 1927; returned after his 1931 doctorate and left in 1932)
- Fields
- Science · Invention · Enterprise
- Era
- Letters, Arts & Sciences
Early Life
Julian was born on 11 April 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama, the oldest of six children of James Sumner Julian, a railway mail clerk, and Elizabeth Lena Adams, a teacher. His grandfather had been enslaved. His father’s federal job gave the family a measure of security, and both parents pressed their children toward education — though public schooling for Black children in Alabama stopped at the eighth grade.
After two years at a normal school, Julian traveled north in 1916 to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, which admitted him as a “sub-freshman” because of the weakness of his schooling, a status he carried until nearly his senior year. He lived in the attic of a fraternity house, where he worked as a waiter, and took other manual jobs to pay his way. His family later moved to Greencastle, and all five of his brothers and sisters graduated from DePauw.
Julian graduated in 1920 as valedictorian and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His professors told him that there were no opportunities in graduate chemistry for a Black student and that they could not help him find one.
Life and Work
He taught chemistry at Fisk University from 1920 to 1922, then went to Harvard as an Austin Fellow and earned a master’s degree in 1923. Harvard fellowships let him continue research under the chemist E. P. Kohler, but the university would not admit him to its doctoral program or appoint a Black man to its faculty. He taught at West Virginia State College from 1926 to 1927 and then joined the chemistry department at Howard University. With a Rockefeller Foundation grant he went to the University of Vienna in the fall of 1929 to study the chemistry of natural products under Ernst Späth, and he received his Ph.D. in September 1931 — by the account of the Encyclopedia of Alabama, only the third African American to earn a doctorate in chemistry.
He returned to Howard with his Viennese colleague Josef Pikl, but after two years a dispute within the university forced them out, and in 1932 DePauw gave him a research post. There, in 1935, Julian and Pikl completed, in DePauw’s Minshall Laboratory, the total synthesis of physostigmine, the alkaloid from the Calabar bean used to treat glaucoma — the first total synthesis of a natural product completed in the United States. Their work overturned a published claim by the leading British chemist Robert Robinson of Oxford, whose synthetic compound Julian showed had different properties from the natural drug.
In 1936 the Glidden Company of Chicago hired him as director of research for its Soya Products Division. Over more than eighteen years he made the division Glidden’s most profitable unit and, with his colleagues, received more than 100 patents. During the Second World War he developed Aero-Foam, a soy-protein foam used by the U.S. military to smother oil and gasoline fires aboard ships. His larger achievement was extracting sterols from soybean oil on an industrial scale and converting them into the hormones progesterone and testosterone at a fraction of their previous cost.
In 1949, after the Mayo Clinic showed that cortisone relieved rheumatoid arthritis, Julian developed a synthesis of Reichstein’s Substance S, a close relative of cortisone lacking one oxygen atom, from soybean-derived starting material. The compound became an important intermediate in producing hydrocortisone and related drugs. In the early 1950s he left Glidden to found Julian Laboratories, which processed Mexican wild yams into the steroid precursor diosgenin at a plant in Mexico. He sold the company to Smith, Kline & French in 1961 for about $2.3 million and then established Julian Associates and the Julian Research Institute.
His scientific success did not protect his family. In 1950 the Julians bought a home in Oak Park, Illinois, the first Black family to own a house in the neighborhood. Before they moved in, arsonists set fire to it on Thanksgiving Day 1950, and on 12 June 1951 it was attacked with dynamite. The family stayed. The NAACP had awarded him its Spingarn Medal in 1947.
Legacy
In 1973 Julian became the first African American chemist elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died in Waukegan, Illinois, on 19 April 1975, eight days after his seventy-sixth birthday. Since 1976 his birthday has been a holiday in the Village of Oak Park.
The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor in its Black Heritage series in 1993, and in 1999 the American Chemical Society designated his synthesis of physostigmine at DePauw a National Historic Chemical Landmark. Schools across the country and a laboratory at MacMurray College, dedicated in 1972, bear his name, and in 2007 the PBS series NOVA devoted a documentary, Forgotten Genius, to his life. His career is now taught as a case study both of scientific achievement and of the price exclusion extracted: much of his most important research was done in industry because the academy would not employ him, and it reached patients as affordable medicine.
Percy Julian’s chemistry made important medicines cheaper and more widely available, and his career shows how racial exclusion shaped where, and how, scientific work got done. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 11 April 1899 Born in Montgomery, Alabama.
- 1920 Graduates from DePauw University as valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa.
- 1923 Earns a master’s degree at Harvard University.
- September 1931 Receives his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna.
- 1935 Completes the total synthesis of physostigmine at DePauw with Josef Pikl.
- 1936 Becomes director of research for Glidden’s Soya Products Division in Chicago.
- 1947 Receives the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal.
- Thanksgiving 1950 His new home in Oak Park, Illinois, is set on fire by arsonists.
- 1961 Sells Julian Laboratories to Smith, Kline & French.
- 1973 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
- 19 April 1975 Dies in Waukegan, Illinois.
Sources and Further Reading
- Bernhard Witkop, “Percy Lavon Julian, 1899–1975,” Biographical Memoirs, vol. 52 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1980). Link
- Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Percy Lavon Julian.” Link
- American Chemical Society, “Synthesis of Physostigmine,” National Historic Chemical Landmark commemorative booklet (1999). Link
- DePauw University, “Percy L. Julian ’20.” Link
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