Percy Julian

Early life

Percy Lavon Julian was born on 11 April 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama, the first of six children and a grandson of formerly enslaved people. Alabama's public schooling for Black children stopped after eighth grade, so Julian went to a two-year teacher-training school instead.

In 1916 he entered DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. The school gave him no dormitory room, and he lived off campus. He graduated in 1920 first in his class and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Education and early career

Senior chemists at Harvard told Julian there was little point in doctoral study because no one would hire a Black researcher. He taught at Fisk University and then earned a master's degree in chemistry from Harvard in 1923. He later led the chemistry department at Howard University. With Rockefeller Foundation support he completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna, where he studied under Ernst Späth. PBS NOVA dates the Ph.D. to 1931, while the NEH article gives 1929.

Physostigmine

Political conflict at Howard left Julian without a job, and his former DePauw professor William Blanchard helped him return there as a research associate. Working with Josef Pikl, he set out to synthesize physostigmine, a compound from the Calabar bean used to treat glaucoma. The British chemist Sir Robert Robinson was pursuing the same goal and published first. Julian found an error in Robinson's route, and in 1935 he and Pikl published a synthesis whose product matched the natural compound. The American Chemical Society later named the work a National Historic Chemical Landmark. Even so, DePauw would not give him a permanent faculty post.

Glidden and the soybean

In 1936 the Glidden Company hired Julian to direct research for its new soy products division in Chicago, and he stayed into the 1950s. His soybean work produced industrial goods, among them a soy protein used in latex paints and the fire-fighting foam Aerofoam, which the U.S. Navy nicknamed "bean soup" and which was used in the Second World War. He also developed ways to isolate sterols from soybean oil as raw material for hormones. NOVA credits him with industrial-scale progesterone production from 1939 and with synthesizing Compound S in 1949, an ingredient that made cortisone cheaper to produce.

Because Glidden wanted him to focus on paints and industrial products, Julian left in 1953 and founded Julian Laboratories to make synthetic steroids. He sold it in 1961, and it later became part of Smith, Kline and French. Over his lifetime he registered more than 130 chemical patents.

Prejudice and recognition

Racism followed his success. In 1950 or 1951 (sources differ), after the family bought a house in the all-white Chicago suburb of Oak Park, arsonists attacked the home with a gasoline bomb. In 1973 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; NOVA describes him as the second African American, and the first Black chemist, to be elected. He died of liver cancer on 19 April 1975 in Waukegan, Illinois.