Percy Julian, Chemist Extraordinaire

Hooray for Google--they taught me something.  Percy Lavon Julian was an amazing man who was born in April (1899) and died in April (1975), so it only seems right that he should be celebrated in April.

Here is what he did that was revolutionary in his lifetime and still relevant today.  The first thing that he did of note was to isolate medications with clinical value  from naturally occurring plants.  In the 1930's he isolated phisostigmine (a treatment for glaucoma) and went on to identify plant based options for the manufacuter of progesterone and testosterone. 

In 1948, the Mayo Clinic announced the discovery of a compound that relieved rheumatoid arthritis. It was cortisone, very difficult to come by. Julian and his team created a synthetic cortisone substitute in 1949 which was radically less expensive but just as effective. Natural cortisone had to be extracted from the adrenal glands of oxen and cost hundreds of dollars per drop; Julian's synthetic cortisone was only pennies per ounce. 

These compounds are all widely in use decades later--when Julian died he was the author of 130 patents and could say that he had made the lives of millions of people better through his discoveries in the lab.  The fact that he was born in the American South at a time when an African American man could not obtain an education beyond the 8th grade makes his story all the more remarkable.