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Forgotten Genius -- Percy Julian PBS/NOVA February 6, 2007

The grandson of Alabama slaves, Percy Julian met with every possible barrier in a deeply segregated

America. He was a man of genius, devotion, and determination. As a black man, he was also an

outsider, fighting to make a place for himself in a profession and country divided by bigotry, a man who

would eventually find freedom in the laboratory. By the time of his death, Julian had risen to the highest

levels of scientific and personal achievement, overcoming countless obstacles to become a world-class

scientist, a self-made millionaire, and a civil-rights pioneer.

Narrator: 1939: A chemist at a Midwestern paint company makes a startling discovery, one that could

improve the health of millions of people. The company wants him to stick to making paint.

But this man has always gone his own way. He was the grandson of Alabama slaves. Yet

he went on to become one of America's great scientists.

Helen Printy (a Julian Laboratories chemist): He had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black

man in America.

John Kenly Smith (historian): The chemical world was a club and outsiders were not really all that

welcome.

Peter Walton (a Julian Laboratories employee): We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very

competitive environment.

Narrator: Outside the laboratory, he faced challenges of a different kind.

2

Percy Julian (dramatization): Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay.

Percy Julian Jr.: My dad was angry when he came home and clearly ready to fight.

Percy Julian (dramatization): For more than a century we have watched the denial of elemental liberty

to millions of black people in our southland.

Narrator: He found freedom in the laboratory. His science helped unlock the secret chemistry of

plants, a discovery that would help relieve one of the most crippling human diseases and

plunge him into one of the fiercest battles in the history of Science.

Gregory Petsko (chemist): This is one of the towering figures of chemistry in 20th

Century and one of

the great African-American scientists of all time.

Narrator: A brilliant chemist, a volatile personality, a man whose devotion to Science would not be

denied.

Willie Pearson (sociologist): This man was "Exhibit A" of determination and never giving up.

V/O (dramatization of Senate Hearings): Please state your full name for the record.

Percy Julian (dramatization): My name is Percy Julian.

Narrator: Every spring in Oak Park, Illinois, people from all over the village would go out of their way

to see the explosion of color at the home on the corner of East and Chicago Avenues.

Percy Julian Jr.: The tulips just went on forever. My dad, he'd be out there in his black beret and my

sense was that he had this love affair with growing things.

Narrator: What many passersby didn't realize was that the tulip grower was also one of America's great

scientists.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Well, ladies and gentleman, essentially I'm going to talk to you about 3

plants. 3 marvelous plants. 3 marvelous plants that make the words of the Psalmist come

true and ring true again: "Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin.

And yet Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like one of these."

Narrator: It was not simply the beauty of plants that captivated Percy Julian but their ability to produce

an endless variety of powerful chemicals. In the 1930s, Julian set out to tap what he called

the "natural laboratories" of plants. To make a new class of drugs that would help millions

of people.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled?

Narrator: Julian fought through extraordinary obstacles to make a place for himself in a profession and

a country divided by race.

3

James Anderson (historian): The message from white society is very clear. It is not your achievement

or your merit or your accomplishments that matter. It's the color of your skin. And because

of that you're rejected.

Gregory Petsko: Yet over and over again, he doesn't let this stop him. He presses on, sure that his

vision of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there is right.

James Shoffner (chemist): After Percy Julian, nobody could say anymore that blacks couldn't do

science because he was at the very top of his profession.

Percy Julian (dramatization): The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement.

Almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings.

Therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility.

One beautiful morning when I was 12 years old, I went berry-picking on my

grandfather's farm in Alabama. I shall never forget how beautiful life seemed to me that

morning, under the spell of an Alabama forest. But in the midst of that beauty, I came

across a Negro body hanging from a tree. He had been lynched a few hours earlier. He

didn't look like a criminal. He just looked like a scared boy.

On the way back, I encountered and killed a rattlesnake. For years afterward every time

I saw a white man, I involuntarily saw the contours of a rattlesnake head on his face. Many

years later, a reporter asked me what were my greatest nightmares from my childhood in the

South. I told him: "White folks and rattlesnakes."

Narrator: Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899 at a time when southerners

lived under a system of forced segregation called 'Jim Crow'.

James Anderson: I think the greatest consequence of Jim Crow is fear. You knew if you said the

wrong thing or went in the wrong door or drank out of the wrong water fountain... That any

of those things could lead to your death.

Narrator: To shelter his children from this oppressive atmosphere, Julian's father turned to the world of

ideas.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Every penny my father could scrape together went into building a

wonderful library for his children because the public library was closed to us. My father

created, in my imagination, brave new worlds to conquer.

Narrator: As a young man, James Julian had been a schoolteacher. His wife Elizabeth was a teacher,

too. They believed education offered the path to a better life for black people.

Denied his own chance to go to college, James made it his mission to send his children

instead. But it would not be easy. In Montgomery and across most of the South, public

schools for black children simply stopped after the 8th

grade.

James Anderson: The message from white society to black students was that you should have just

enough education to be good field hands and good laborers, cooks, and maids and so forth.

4

Narrator: With no high school to attend, Percy Julian completed 2 years at the local teacher training

school for Negroes. In 1916 with barely a 10th

grade education, Percy Julian became the

first member of his family to live out his father's dream.

Percy Julian (dramatization): During the hectic week of preparations, my father had taken me aside for

a long talk. "This is the greatest moment of your life," he told me. "But it is also a great

responsibility for you are now beginning to create a family. A family of educated people."

There they were. 3 generations of hope and prayer waving to a 4th

generation that was

going off to college! And why? Because they had the simple faith that the last great hope

of the Earth is education for all the people.

Narrator: Julian's destination was DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Greencastle,

Indiana. DePauw had accepted a few black students since the Civil War but expected them

to "know their place".

James Anderson: A black student entering a white university … If they didn't know before they

arrived, they found out pretty quickly that they were not welcome in the university or in the

community.

Narrator: Instead of being assigned to a dorm like his white classmates, Julian was shown to an off-

campus room with a slop jar for a toilet.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I soon got up enough courage to ask Mrs. Townsend what time we would

have dinner. But she tersely informed me that she was not expected to give me my meals.

Narrator: Julian wandered the streets of Greencastle for a day-and-a-half before finding a diner that

would serve a Negro.

He would continue to take his meals off-campus until he learned of an opening at the

Sigma Chi fraternity. In exchange for waiting on his housemates and firing their furnace,

Julian could have a room in the basement. He soon felt at ease in the fraternity. But the

classroom was a different matter.

James Anderson: You sit in a classroom with kids who have read things that you never heard of.

They've taken math courses that you haven't taken. And so one of the academic challenges

is trying to hold on until you can catch up.

Narrator: For 2 years, Julian would take remedial classes at a local high school in addition to his normal

course load.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I remember writing to my father: "I know you and Mother have always

known what was best for me. But I think you made a mistake by sending me to compete

with these white students. They are so brilliant that I am always hopelessly behind."

Narrator: But by his sophomore year, Julian was gaining fast on his white classmates thanks in part to

the encouragement of chemistry professor William Blanchard. Blanchard had what one

student called "a contagious enthusiasm for discovering the unknown." Under his tutelage,

Julian began to dream of a career as a research chemist.

5

Only one African-American had ever earned a doctorate in chemistry. His name was St.

Elmo Brady. Julian decided that if Brady could do it, so could he. After 4 years, he

graduated Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class.

Percy Julian (dramatization): At commencement time, my great-grandmother bared her shoulders and

she showed me -- for the first time -- the deep scars that had remained from a beating she

had received when one day during the waning days of the Civil War she went through the

Negro quarters and cried out: "Get yourselves ready, children. The Yankees are coming.

The Lord has heard our prayers!"

And then proudly she took my Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said: "This is worth

all the scars."

Narrator: Encouraged by Percy's success, his father moved the whole family north to Greencastle to

send the rest of the children to DePauw. Eventually, Julian's 2 brothers would become

doctors and his 3 sisters would earn master's degrees.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I shall never forget an anxious week of waiting in 1920 to see if I would

get into graduate school. I stood by as day-by-day my fellow students in chemistry said: "I

am going to Illinois", "I'm going to Ohio State", or "I'm going to Michigan." "Where are

you going?" they asked. And they answered for me: "You must be waiting for the Harvard

plum!"

I could stand the suspense no longer. I went to Professor Blanchard. And there he

showed me numerous letters from men who had really meant "god" to me, great American

chemists of their day. "Discourage your bright colored lad," they wrote. "We couldn't get

him a job when he's done and it'll only mean frustration. Why don't you find him a teaching

job in a Negro college in the South? He doesn't need a Ph.D. for that."

James Anderson: What happened to Julian was something that would have been common throughout

the land. To have a good college education was way beyond anything that one would

expect for an African-American. And so there's the sense that he'd had enough. "Stop here.

Be content with this. Go back and teach your people."

Narrator: In 1920, Julian reluctantly returned to the South to teach. But he clung to the dream of

earning his Ph.D. At 21, he was embarking on a quest that would last more than 10 years.

His first stop was Fisk University in Nashville, one of the best Negro colleges in the

country. His idol -- St. Elmo Brady -- had studied at Fisk. But Julian chafed at the

limitations of the black college system. Overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries, and

poorly equipped laboratories.

After 2 years, he was on the move again. Julian had won a scholarship to study

chemistry at one of America's most famous universities.

Percy Julian (dramatization): No Negro has yet obtained his master's degree in chemistry at Harvard.

And so I'm up against a hard situation again.

James Anderson: When Julian arrived at Harvard in 1922, the racial climate was probably worse than it

had been at any point in the 20th

Century.

6

Narrator: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had set the tone by banning black students from the dorms

in Harvard Yard.

Julian sailed through his first year and earned his master's degree in the spring of 1923.

He continued his studies for 3 more years but left Harvard without his doctorate. Years

later, he would bitterly tell friends he had been denied the teaching assistantship he needed

to stay in school.

James Anderson: If you were going to be a teaching assistant and teach white students, that was a no-

no. That's just hardly acceptable at that time and that place. If you were denied that, you

were also denied the opportunity to finance your education.

Narrator: Julian spent an unhappy year teaching at a small black college near Charleston, West

Virginia. Then his fortunes turned. He was invited to join the faculty at the Nation's most

distinguished black university -- Howard University in Washington, D.C.

He was replacing St. Elmo Brady who was returning to Fisk. Julian went straight to

work, designing a new chemistry building and honing a distinctive lecture style.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I should warn you that scientists are traditionally poor speakers because

they have a hard time letting go of their gobbledy-gook. "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away

home" becomes impossible when you must call the ladybird "coccinella bipunctata."

Narrator: Despite his growing stature at Howard, Julian was still determined to earn his Ph.D. In 1929,

he finally got his chance. He won a fellowship that allowed him to take a leave from

Howard to study at the University of Vienna in Austria. He was about to begin a lifelong

inquiry into the chemistry of plants.

Gregory Petsko: For thousands of years, long before there was such a thing as a science of Chemistry,

people were fascinated by plants because they knew that plants contained substances that

could affect people. Coffee will keep you awake. Tobacco contains something that will

calm your nerves. Foxglove contains an extract that'll affect your heart.

And the whole goal of chemistry in the early part of the 20th

Century was to understand

what these natural products were. To characterize their chemical structures and figure out

how to make them. This was called "natural products chemistry". It was the main branch of

Chemistry. And in 1929, Vienna in Austria was the seat of natural products chemistry. And

that's why Percy Julian went there.

Narrator: Julian arrived at Vienna's Chemische Institut with huge crates of ground glassware. Items

that the Viennese students had heard about but never seen.

Bernhard Witkop (National Academy of Sciences Member): The unpacking became a big ceremony

surrounded by fellow students who "oohed" and "aahed" about the wonders that came out of

these crates.

Narrator: Among the onlookers was Josef Pikl, a chemist who would become one of Julian's closest

friends and collaborators. They had come to Vienna to study under the renowned scientist

Ernst Späth. Späth was a giant in the field of natural products chemistry. He had a

particular interest in a family of compounds called alkaloids.

7

Gregory Petsko: Of all the natural products, the ones that fascinated people the most were the alkaloids

because they seemed the most powerful. A thimbleful of some alkaloids would bring down

an elephant.

Narrator: It's believed that many alkaloids evolved to protect plants from organisms that might eat or

harm them. But these same compounds can have unexpected effects on people.

Gregory Petsko: We now know, for example, that it's an alkaloid -- caffeine -- that's responsible for the

stimulant effect of coffee beans. We also know that it's an alkaloid called nicotine that's the

calming influence in tobacco plants. Other alkaloids are things like morphine, strychnine,

cocaine. A whole host of things that we now know are drugs turn out to be plant alkaloids.

Narrator: By 1929, it was known that an alkaloid from the root of a common Austrian shrub called

Corydalis cava was effective in treating pain and heart palpitations. Späth asked Julian to

find out why.

Dagmar Ringe (chemist): And so the question was which compound -- which precise compound in this

tuber -- is responsible for the biological effect that one is seeing?

Narrator: Isolate the active ingredient in Corydalis cava and then identify its chemical structure. This

was the challenge that Julian would have to meet to earn his Ph.D.

Free at last of teaching and administrative duties, he threw himself into his research as

never before.

Percy Julian (dramatization): For the first time in my life, I represent a creating, alive and wide-awake

chemist. I recognize that publications and research will be -- for me -- as natural a thing as

going to bed and eating a meal. Truly, I was the luckiest guy in all the World to land here.

Narrator: Just outside the laboratory was a vibrant world that Julian was eager to explore. A fellow

student, Edwin Mosettig, took the American under his wing. Soon Julian was joining the

Mosettig family for ski trips, swims in the Danube, and the opera.

Bernhard Witkop: The mother of Edwin Mosettig was a famous musician and the Mosettig house was

a center for social activity. So in that way, Percy got access to layers of the society that

were inaccessible in America. Black persons in Europe were very rare. And Percy -- for the

first time in his life -- fully unfolded because he was admired there.

Narrator: For Julian, the sense of freedom was exhilarating. In letter after letter, he described his busy

social life to colleagues back at Howard.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And now a little news: I have the prettiest girl in Vienna. You have never

gazed on such beauty. Monday night, we were in the opera and heard Beethoven's Fidelio.

Nature makes its demands. So I've made a date with my little German sweetheart. They

didn't lie when they talked of beautiful Viennese women. Afterwards, we went to the

sweetest wine cellar you ever saw and drank 'til 3:00 a.m.

Narrator: But at 7:55 each morning, Julian was back in the laboratory, working under the watchful eye

of a man so severe he would immediately fail a student he considered lazy or untalented.

8

The pressure was mounting on Julian to isolate the elusive alkaloids on which his

dissertation depended.

Percy Julian (dramatization): The last 2 months, I have passed through a hellish siege of work.

Reaction-upon-reaction and yet I stand at the door and knock, as it were. I don't know a

damned thing.

Narrator: The alkaloids that puzzled Julian -- like most of the molecules of Life -- are made primarily

of Carbon.

Gregory Robinson (chemist): Carbon is really the "super glue" of the chemical world in the sense that

Carbon can bond to itself in almost an infinite number of ways.

Dagmar Ringe: In this model, for instance, I can make a chain of carbons that continues, practically,

infinitely. However, it can also come together into a ring structure. In this case, a 6-carbon

ring structure.

Narrator: The carbon ring is one of nature's fundamental building blocks, found in an endless variety of

compounds. Members of the alkaloid family all have one-or-more Nitrogen atoms. But

otherwise their structures vary widely. Which presented Julian with a formidable challenge.

Ned Heindel (chemist): He was working in some very difficult chemistry. When you don't know

anything about what the structure is of the material you're isolating, you have to tear your

molecule apart atom-by-atom and try to deduce the structure.

Dagmar Ringe: It's like finding a needle in a haystack. It requires stubbornness. It requires focus. It

requires repeating over-and-over the same kinds of processes until the answers come out.

Narrator: Slowly the answers did come. In his second year, Julian finally identified the active alkaloid

in Corydalis cava, his first chemical triumph. This work with Späth would be the

foundation of his future career.

Bernhard Witkop: When Ernst Späth was asked about his student Percy Julian, he characterized him

and said: "Ein ausserordentlicher Student wie ich in meiner Laufbahn noch nie gehabt

habe" ("an extraordinary student, the likes of which I have never had before in my career as

a teacher.")

Narrator: Julian returned to America in the fall of 1931 with the doctorate he had pursued for more

than a decade. The years in Vienna had dramatically increased his self-confidence. But

they had also sown the seeds of a personal catastrophe that awaited him at Howard.

Back in Washington, Julian set out to turn Howard into a center for true chemical

research, something his predecessor had been unable to do. Burdened with teaching

responsibilities, St. Elmo Brady had not published a single research paper in the 15 years

since earning his Ph.D. Julian was determined this would not happen to him.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I am going to give every damned ounce of my energy towards plans to

flood the chemical market with as much research as the day's hours and my strength will

allow.

9

Narrator: He brought Josef Pikl over from Vienna and the two went straight to work on a series of

papers.

When their first was accepted for publication, Julian proudly noted it was the first with a

black chemist as senior author. Percy Julian was now America's preeminent black chemist

and at Howard one of President Mordecai Johnson's rising stars.

But Johnson had made many enemies in his 5 years at Howard. Soon Julian would be

caught up in university politics with disastrous results. The trouble began when Julian (at

the president's request) goaded a white chemist named Jacob Shohan into resigning. Shohan

retaliated by releasing to the local black press the letters Julian had written to him from

Vienna.

Julian's accounts of his romances, his criticism of faculty members -- suddenly it was all

public, ammunition to be used against Julian and Johnson by the president's enemies.

Just as Julian's letters began to appear in the press, there was another bombshell. His

laboratory assistant Robert Thompson charged that he had found his wife and Julian

together. Lawsuits flew between Julian and Thompson. When Thompson was fired for

going public with his charges, he released the letters that Julian had written to him from

Vienna.

Through the summer of 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American published letter after letter

from the man the newspaper dubbed "Howard's Prize Letter-Writer."

Finally under pressure from Johnson and the Board of Trustees, Julian resigned. It was

the middle of the Great Depression. Julian was a chemist without a laboratory, a black man

without a job. Only a year after his triumphant return from Vienna, the career he had

worked so hard to build was in ruins.

When all seemed lost, Julian's mentor William Blanchard threw him a lifeline, bringing

him back to DePauw as a research fellow to supervise lab sections. It was a big step down

from full professor and department chairman. But he had a lab again and his research

partner Josef Pikl would join him at DePauw.

Percy Julian (dramatization): In much of my life, I've had to pick up the broken fragments of chance

and turn them into opportunity.

Narrator: Over the next 3 years, 11 of the student projects Julian supervised would lead to papers in the

Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Ned Heindel: 11 undergraduate papers published in JACS out of a student body of that size was not

only unusual for the 1930s, but it would be unusual now. Julian took the talent in those

students and put that institution on the map for undergraduate research.

Narrator: DePauw's newest instructor left a powerful impression on undergraduate Ray Dawson.

Ray Dawson (a DePauw alumnus): He put on a grand show. He would come into his lectures in his

white lab jacket with a flourish. He was oratorical in a way some great scientist from

London or Berlin might be. It was just a show. But a very good one.

10

Narrator: Julian had finally found fulfillment. A place where he could teach and research. But when

the local American Legion assailed the school for hiring a Negro who had been dismissed

from Howard University, Julian was forced to stop teaching. He could stay on as long as his

research grant lasted. But his days at DePauw were numbered. Everything that he had

work for was about to collapse again.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I decided I had to do things that would make people take more notice of

me.

Narrator: What he did was take on a high-stakes research project. It was one that would either make

him or break him.

Percy Julian (dramatization): It all began with a simple little bean, the Calabar bean. It was a beautiful,

purple bean when I first got it. But it is not only beautiful in its appearance, but also in the

laboratory it has within it.

Narrator: Chemists had been fascinated by the Calabar bean ever since British missionaries brought it

back from Africa in the mid-1800s. From the bean, they had isolated an alkaloid called

physostigmine. It was used to treat glaucoma. But no one had been able to synthesize the

complex molecule.

Gregory Petsko: Synthesis is the process of making a natural product or some other substance

artificially in the lab one step at a time from extremely simple building blocks.

Narrator: Synthesis was the highest calling for a chemist in the 1930s. A successful synthesis could

bring great medical benefits by making a scarce natural product more widely available. Just

as important, it proved beyond a doubt that the chemist understood how the molecule was

put together.

Ned Heindel: There were very few alkaloids that had been made from scratch in Julian's time. The

synthesis of physostigmine would bring recognition to whoever achieved it. And that's what

Percy Julian set out to do.

Narrator: But Julian was not alone. At Oxford University, another chemist was at work on his own

synthesis. His name was Robert Robinson.

Ned Heindel: Sir Robert Robinson was sort of the dean of organic chemists in England. He was a

much-respected creator of molecules, a trainer of many Ph.D. students. He was the premier

organic chemist of his time.

Narrator: Moving step-by-step toward a final synthesis, Robinson had already published 9 papers on

physostigmine in Britain's leading chemical journal.

Ned Heindel: It's a little bit of intimidation. The World is supposed to know "I've got this domain; you

stay out of it."

Narrator: But to Julian, Robinson's approach seemed clumsy. Convinced there was a simpler way, he

set out to beat the Englishman to the synthesis. A high-profile scientific victory would be

just the thing to get his career back on track. But it wouldn't be easy. Physostigmine was

unlike any molecule that had been synthesized before.

11

Ned Heindel: It bristled with spots around the molecule where methyl groups were hanging (that's a

Carbon with 3 Hydrogens). There are actually 4 of these and getting them in the right place

is essential to making Nature's molecule. It was a formidable chemical challenge for

anybody to tackle in the early 1930s.

Narrator: Julian tackled it the way all chemists do -- one step at a time.

Gregory Petsko: When you synthesize a molecule, you start with very small substances. Substances

you can buy or that you know how to make already. You then start assembling those into

fragments of the thing that you're hoping to make in the end. They are called

"intermediates." And what you're doing is you're following a particular path. This path

takes you from the simple starting substances all the way to the final product, the natural

product.

Narrator: To build his molecule, Julian drew on a battery of techniques for manipulating atoms.

Ned Heindel: One can heat something to a very high temperature. That usually gets the atoms vibrating

and makes new bonds possible. You can oxidize something; you can add oxygen to it. You

can take oxygen out of a molecule; that's a reduction. We can expose it to pressure.

Sometimes, we can expose it to light to cajole the atoms to do what we want.

Narrator: At each step, Julian had to verify that he'd actually made the compounds he intended to. For

this, he relied on a device called a "combustion train".

Ned Heindel: This technique takes an organic molecule which contains Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen,

and Oxygen and burns it.

Narrator: By weighing the resulting gases, Julian could tell what atoms were present and in what ratio.

Gregory Petsko: How much Carbon does it have? How much Hydrogen does it have? How much

Nitrogen does it have? If your compound has the right ratio, then you're a long way towards

being sure you've made what you thought you made.

Ned Heindel: And then you repeat this process of purification and of analysis for each intermediate

until you finally get to the natural product.

Narrator: Julian was under tremendous pressure to complete the research. Pressure compounded by

events in his personal life. He was engaged. His fiancée was the woman who had been at

the center of the Howard scandal. The former wife of his laboratory assistant Robert

Thompson.

Born Anna Roselle Johnson, she was a member of a prominent African-American

family from Baltimore. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was now working toward a

Ph.D. in sociology.

Ray Dawson: They had already set, I believe, 2 wedding dates. Which he had canceled and she told

him that this was the last time. Unless he kept the new latest date, she would break off their

engagement. And he was quite upset by this. But he had no choice but to proceed because

we were only a few weeks away from the end.

12

Narrator: In 1934, Julian and Pikl sent off their first paper on physostigmine, outlining a new approach

to the synthesis. Julian attacked Robinson in the beginning lines of the paper.

Ned Heindel: To have a young upstart taking on the pope of organic chemistry in England, naming him

and coupling the words "failure" and "embarrassing" and "low yield" is almost unbelievably

aggressive.

Gregory Robinson: In many regards, that was a pivotal point in Julian's career. If he were wrong, he

could effectively, almost, write off any research career at that point.

Narrator: Working around the clock, Julian and Pikl synthesized a compound that was one step

removed from physostigmine. Since that last step was already known, this would count as a

complete synthesis.

But before they could publish, Robinson struck again with his own synthesis of the same

compound. The race was over.

Percy Julian (dramatization): The shock was almost unbearable. We were not the first. Just the "me

toos." Why did he of so much fame -- who didn't at all need the glory -- have to snatch the

prize from us?

Suddenl, my eye caught something. "Look, Josef! He's made a big blunder." Our

crystals melted at about 39° Celsius, body temperature. Indeed, we were able to melt them

by closing them in our armpits. His compound melted not at body temperature but almost

50 degrees higher. "He hasn't got it!" I cried.

Ned Heindel: The melting point of a molecule is a fingerprint. If Julian's melting point is correct, then

Robinson's can't be and these can't be the same substance. And Julian quickly grasps on that

and says, "You've got the wrong compound."

Narrator: Julian hurriedly wrote an addendum to their next paper.

Percy Julian (dramatization): "We believe that the English authors are in error." Josef was a very

unhappy man. "If we are wrong, we are irretrievably ruined," he said.

It hit like a bombshell. Telegrams came in from all over the world. My old professor

Kohler of Harvard wrote: "I pray that you are right. If not, the future may be dark for you."

Ned Heindel: Part of what he's just done here is a go-for-broke plan. He's working as an underpaid

assistant in a liberal arts college. He desperately needs a break.

Narrator: Now the pressure was on Julian and Pikl to prove they were right.

Ray Dawson: Percy was a bundle of nerves. But yet, he had this underlying drive that didn't permit him

to stop, to run away, to give up.

Narrator: To confirm his synthesis, Julian needed to take one final melting point.

Dagmar Ringe: When chemists took a melting point, they would put some crystals into a capillary tube,

strap that capillary tube to a thermometer, and then place the complete assembly into an oil

bath. They're looking to determine the exact moment when the crystals begin to melt.

13

Narrator: To claim victory over Robinson, Julian had to show that another set of crystals from his

synthesis melted at the same temperature as their natural counterpart, 135 degrees.

Ned Heindel: This has got to be the ultimate high. "I've taken on the master and I've beaten him."

Narrator: The physostigmine papers were immediately recognized as a milestone in American

chemical history. An early example of what chemists call "total synthesis" -- i.e., the

complete assembly of a complex molecule from basic chemical building blocks.

Ned Heindel: Julian's pathway to physostigmine is so simple that it can be summarized in essentially 2

publications. Chemists look at them and marvel at "How did he do that in so elegant of a

sequence?"

James Shoffner: To call a process "elegant" means that the synthesis is achieved in the minimal amount

of steps necessary in order to bring about a product. And so that's really to give it the

highest accolade that you can give. That it is elegant.

Narrator: In 1935, Percy finally married Anna in a private ceremony on Christmas Eve. As his bride

went back East to finish her doctorate, Julian looked forward to new career opportunities

that his triumph would bring.

On the strength of the physostigmine work, William Blanchard had recommended his

protégé for a permanent faculty position at DePauw.

Donald "Jack" Cook (former DePauw Chemistry Chairman): If DePauw had recognized Percy's

capabilities and put him on the staff at that time, it would have been a historical event. But

it didn't happen.

Narrator: Julian applied to other universities. With the same result.

James Anderson: Most institutions would not even tolerate for a second having an African-American in

the role of a teacher or a faculty.

Willie Pearson: This was during a time of rampant scientific racism. There were a number of scholars

at Harvard and other institutions that were doing scientific studies and reporting that

African-Americans did not have the capacity to do science because they were actually an

inferior race.

Narrator: In early 1936, Julian's research grant ran out. Now with no hope of an academic career, he

turned his attention to industry. America's leading chemical corporation -- DuPont -- had

invited Julian and Pikl for an interview. DuPont executives offered Pikl a job. To Julian, he

later recalled, they offered an apology: "We didn't know you were a Negro."

John Kenly Smith: The world of chemical research and development in industry in this period was

overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men and outsiders were not really all that

welcome.

Narrator: At Julian's insistence, Pikl took the job at DuPont and spent the rest of his career there.

Julian returned to the job hunt.

14

Percy Julian (dramatization): Day-by-day as I entered these firms, presented my credentials, and asked

for a job, the answer almost seemed like it had been transmitted by wire from one firm to

the other. It ran like this: "We've never hired a Negro research chemist before. We don't

know how it would work out."

Narrator: Finally, Julian caught a break. The Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin was

prepared to make him an offer.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And then they were informed by city attorneys that an old Appleton

statute forbade Negroes from being housed in Appleton overnight. This in the Year of our

Lord, 1936!

But in that meeting sat a board member an Irishman named William J. O'Brien.

Narrator: O'Brien was vice president of the Glidden Company. He had been looking for a sharp

chemist to run the company's new Chicago laboratory. He offered Julian the job of Director

of Research.

PERCY JULIAN (dramatization): I had already wired Anna several times that I had landed jobs. So

this time I was a little more cautious. "Am considering offer Glidden Company in research

at $5,000." Her reply came back: "What do you mean `considering'?"

John Kenly Smith: The fact that Percy Julian was hired to be the director of a laboratory -- and not just

a member of a laboratory -- is truly remarkable and unprecedented.

James Shoffner: That was 10 years before Jackie Robinson. You know? And we look toward the

Jackie Robinson example as being pivotal in opening up not just baseball but a whole lot of

other opportunities for black people.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And so I came to Chicago and started in on another fascinating plant --

the soybean.

Narrator: Neither Julian nor anyone else in 1936 had any idea what a powerhouse the soybean would

become.

Today. the soybean is one of the pillars of American agriculture, second only to corn

among the major crops. 70 million acres of farmland are planted in soy with an annual

harvest worth more than $20 billion. Soy is used in a wide range of products from food and

medicine to paper and plastics.

Todd Allen (a soybean farmer): It's a very widely used commodity. If you go down to the grocery store

and look at the label, you'll find soybean oil in there somewhere.

Soybeans originally came into this country from China as a hay crop for grazing for beef

cattle. But also, it manufactures its own nitrogen. And back in the 1920s, well, then

everybody needed that because we didn't have a lot of commercial fertilizer back then.

But then as our machinery developed, we learned that we could cut and process these

soy beans and break them down into feed for our animals and soy oil for human

consumption.

15

Narrator: But soybeans really took off in the 1930s when industry discovered the plant, thanks in part

to the efforts of an unlikely champion -- automaker Henry Ford. Ford planted thousands of

acres of soybeans and alongside his Dearborn auto plant, he built a soybean laboratory and

processing factory.

John Kenly Smith: Ford sets up a laboratory in the early 1930s; hires a young self-trained chemist to

run the laboratory; and they begin doing lots of experiments trying to figure how you could

use soybeans in making cars.

Narrator: Out of his lab came new soybean-based auto paints, lubricating oils, and soybean-based

plastics that Ford turned into steering wheels, gearshift knobs, and dent-proof fenders.

V/O (Film Clip): Industrial chemists are working to find new uses for soybean oil and soybean meal.

Narrator: Soon other industrialists were following Ford's lead, building soybean processing plants

across the Midwest.

One of the first to embrace the "miracle bean" was Percy Julian's new boss Adrian Joyce

of the Glidden Company. Under Joyce, Glidden had grown from a single paint store in

Cleveland into one of the Nation's leading paint manufacturers.

John Kenly Smith: But Joyce didn't stop there. He diversified into a wide range of products. Durkee

Famous Foods was a Glidden brand. He also moved into soybean processing.

Narrator: Convinced the soybean would be critical to Glidden's future, Joyce set up a new Soya

Products Division in Chicago. The first assignment for his new research director was to

isolate the protein of the soybean, something that had never been done on an industrial

scale.

Julian plunged into his new job, keenly aware that people were watching to see how this

black chemist would measure up.

Peter Walton: The people in the plant were always mindful of a white laboratory coat. A blur that

might swoop down at any moment.

Helen Printy: He would pester you at many times. He would keep, you know, wanting to know what

was new, every-half an-hour almost.

Risher Watts (a Julian Laboratories chemist): And he expected you to tell him something different

every time he came in there. Something that was favorable.

Narrator: But for more than a year, the news was not favorable.

Risher Watts In Chemistry, things don't ever go the way you plan it because you've got reactions that

are very critical. Even a little variation in temperature, in concentration and time, and

everything will give you a bad outcome.

Narrator: Eventually, Julian's chemists found just the right combination of time, temperature, and

acidity to pull the protein out of the soybean. Julian's "Alpha protein" was the first

vegetable protein produced in bulk anywhere in America. It made millions for Glidden as a

new industrial paper coating.

16

Later it would be a key ingredient in one of the first water-based (or "latex") house

paints -- Glidden's Spred Satin.

V/O (Paint Commercial): Get new Spred house paint.

Narrator: After Alpha protein, Adrian Joyce urged Julian to turn his attention to other parts of the

soybean.

John Kenly Smith: Joyce was always trying to figure out every possible use for everything you have.

Find out "is there some chemical in here that we otherwise might be throwing down the drai,

that we might be able to make money out of?"

Narrator: Julian drove his staff to turn the soybean inside out.

Arnold Hirsch (a Julian Laboratories chemist): Julian wanted everyone to perform to the best of their

ability and he did everything in his power to motivate people to do that.

James Letton (a Julian Laboratories production manager): I always thought he was a master

psychologist. I think he was very much aware of what he was doing and who he was doing

it to.

Risher Watts: His purpose was to get the best out of you. I think that's what it was all about.

Narrator: The chemistry invented by Julian and his team led to scores of new products. From soybean

oil came lecithin to make chocolate smoother, new salad oils and shortenings for Durkee,

and a new non-spattering margarine.

Helen Printy: Always when you were working on one thing, there was another thing coming up. You

were always thinking ahead of time what was the next big thing?

Narrator: From soybean meal came plastics, linoleum, plywood glue, high-protein livestock feed, and

dog food.

Helen Printy: He was brilliant. He would set out a research project and he would write the introduction

and the description of the work and a conclusion. He did everything except do the

experiment.

Gene Woroch (a Glidden chemist): And there would be a statement, something to the effect that "The

problem is solved; all that remains to be done is..." And many of us used to cringe at this

because it would be our responsibility to get this to work. And sometimes it didn't work.

Risher Watts: He was very demanding. And that was on a daily basis, I mean, because he had his hands

on everything that went on.

V/O (Film Clip): Yes, there's magic in this Cinderella crop. And we've hardly scratched the surface.

Narrator: The stream of products coming out of Julian's lab joined the flood of household and

industrial goods from Dow, DuPont, and other companies whose chemistry was changing

the way that Americans lived.

17

V/O (Film Clip): ...nylon stockings introduced in 1938. There's barely a minute of your time on

Earth that is not in some way made secure and comfortable through Chemistry.

John Kenly Smith: There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for chemicals in the 1930s.

V/O (Film Clip): Here are the headquarters of a group of super-sleuths engaged in solving some of

the major mysteries of the Universe. They take molecules apart and put them together again

in a different form to make new and incredible things.

Narrator: People saw the industry as sort of the leading edge of high technology, of providing goods

and services that were going to make people's lives better and to keep the economy growing.

V/O (Film Clip): The Nation's industrial skyline parted in the middle to make room for the growing

chemical industry.

Narrator: Glidden's new soybean division was a success. J ulian's reward was a raise that allowed him

to be reunited with Anna. For the first 3 years of their marriage, she had been back East

earning her Ph.D. and working in the Washington public schools. Now she joined Percy in

Chicago at last.

As the couple settled into their new home in the Westside community of Maywood,

Anna learned just how driven her husband could be when it came to Chemistry.

"Science can be a hard taskmaster," she would remember. "Dinner can be at 7:00 or

11:00 as far as the true disciple of Chemistry is concerned."

Glidden was delighted with Julian's chemistry. But Julian was becoming restless.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I was itching to get away from dog foods, paint, and oleomargarine and to

tackle Nature again with more exacting methods.

Helen Printy: Dr. Julian loved Chemistry. He used to take the people that were working on the

products for the Glidden Company and sneak us off and do other things that he was

interested in, on the side.

Narrator: Julian was especially interested in a compound called progesterone.

V/O (Medical Film Clip): New ways of controlling fertility have begun to suggest...

Narrator: Discovered in 1934, progesterone was called the "pregnancy hormone" because it plays a

central role in preparing a woman's uterus for childbirth.

Helen Printy: Apparently, Mrs. Julian had had a couple of miscarriages. And doctors at that time had

found that progesterone was essential to carrying a child to term.

Woman-in-labor (Medical Film Clip): The pains are getting harder.

Narrator: In the 1930s, nearly 1 out of every 6 pregnancies in America ended in miscarriage or

premature birth.

Doctor (Medial Film Clip): Relax. Your baby is almost here now.

18

Narrator: Hundreds-of-thousands of babies were lost each year. Julian realized that progesterone

offered new hope. He and other chemists began looking for ways to make the hormone for

pregnant women at risk.

Progesterone is one of a class of compounds called steroids which scientists were just

beginning to realize played many key roles in the body.

Gregory Petsko: They were involved in reproduction. They were involved in sexual development.

They were involved in the response to injury and growth. And yet despite this enormous

range of different physiological effects, these compounds all seemed to have similar

chemical structures.

Dagmar Ringe: The group of molecules that we call steroids all share a common framework composed

of these 4-ring systems right here. A 6-membered ring fused to a second 6-membered ring

fused to a third 6-membered ring fused to a 5-membered ring.

Narrator: Dozens of steroid molecules are made by the body ranging from cholesterol to digestive

fluids to sex hormones such as progesterone and testosterone. The anabolic steroids used by

some athletes today are simply modified forms of the natural male hormone.

Ned Heindel: Once it was recognized that the family of materials we call steroids had such an impact on

human health, there became a global push. "Can we get these materials? Can we make

them available?" And "What sources do they come from?

Narrator: Chemists first tried isolating steroids from animal extracts like horse urine. But the process

required vast amounts of raw material and yielded only tiny amounts of steroids.

Gregory Petsko: The breakthrough in making steroids available was the realization that you could take

substances from plants that could form the starting point for the synthesis of steroids. That

would give you a leg up on the process.

Narrator: In the mid-1930s, scientists had discovered that plants have steroids too with the same 4

carbon rings found in animal steroids.

Dagmar Ringe: It was only a very small leap to realize that one could convert a plant steroid into an

animal steroid.

Narrator: The idea that plants made chemicals similar to human steroids was something Julian already

knew. Back at DePauw while researching physostigmine, Julian had set aside a dish of

Calabar bean oil. A few days later, he found white crystals in the oil.

Searching the literature, he found that these crystals were a plant steroid called

stigmasterol. Small amounts of stigmasterol were also found in soybean oil and Julian now

had plenty of that at Glidden. He was confident that he could convert it into progesterone if

he could find a way to extract this stigmasterol from the oil.

But Julian was not the only one who saw the potential of making steroids from plants.

In 1938, a chemist named Russell Marker found a way to convert steroids from sarsaparilla

root into progesterone by chemically snipping off the "side chain" of extra atoms from the

19

plant steroid. It was breakthrough chemistry. But progesterone made from sarsaparilla root

was too expensive to be practical. The race was on for a cheaper source.

Gregory Petsko: I think that both Percy Julian and Russell Marker understood the medical implications

of what they were trying to do, that they knew if those natural products could be provided in

quantity, that the face of medicine would be changed.

Narrator: Marker published paper-after-paper documenting his search for a plant that would yield

cheap progesterone. Julian saw his chance slipping away. There wasn't much time for this

kind of research amid the daily demands of his job.

Percy Julian (dramatization): One day the phone rang and the fellow said: "Doc, something's happened.

Some water's leaked into Soybean Oil Tank No. 1 and it's spoiled. "Spoiled?" I said.

"Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled?"

Now, you understand that this tank contained 100,000 gallons of refined soybean oil

bound for the Durkee Famous Foods plant. If it were ruined, Glidden would be out

$200,000. And such a blunder might cost me my job. So I was over there in a jiffy.

Narrator: Julian found the giant tank fouled with white sludge. But his despair vanished in a flash of

recognition. There were crystals in the sludge at the bottom of the tank. They were

stigmasterol -- the same crystals he'd found in the dish of Calabar oil. Now he realized what

had forced the stigmasterol out of both oils -- water.

Jack Cook: You couldn't destroy a 100,000-gallon tank of soybean oil to get this steroid out,\. But

when you add a little water to it, it falls out. It precipitates. It separates on its own.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And it was this little accidental discovery -- the kind that characterize the

development of Science so often -- that led to a practical method for the isolation of steroids

from soybean oil.

Narrator: Now a step ahead of Marker, Julian developed an industrial process for converting

stigmasterol into progesterone in bulk.

Ned Heindel: Julian did not discover the primary chemistry that took stigmasterol over to progesterone.

That came out of a German group 5 years earlier. But he was the first person to realize that

it could be scaled up. A company that's in the paint business suddenly becomes a player in

the human sex hormone game.

Narrator: In 1940, Julian sent a 1-pound package of progesterone to the Upjohn pharmaceutical

company. Shipped under armed guard and valued at nearly $70,000, it was the first

commercial shipment of an artificial sex hormone produced anywhere in America.

Testosterone and other artificial sex hormones soon followed, bringing millions of

dollars in unexpected revenue to Glidden.

Despite his growing stature, Julian was barred from a major hormone conference held at

an exclusive resort in Maryland. Only after 3 days of protest by his white colleagues was he

finally admitted.

20

Within a year, Julian would face a new challenge. His rival Russell Marker had

discovered a giant yam in Mexico. It was even richer in steroids than soybeans. In 1944,

Marker and 2 partners formed a company called Syntex to make hormones from the yam.

For the rest of the decade, Syntex and Glidden would produce most of the World's supply of

artificial sex hormones.

Gregory Petsko: I think the decision to make substances like steroids from plants -- rather than from

animal tissues -- was a landmark in the history of Medicine as well as the history of

Chemistry. It meant that you could take steroids that before were so rare that you barely

knew what they were and you could inject them into animals or people and see their effects

on a variety of conditions. The possibilities that that opened up almost were limitless.

Narrator: The work of Julian and Marker would lay the foundation for a whole new class of medicines

including the birth control pill and a wonder drug that would soon take the World by storm.

By the mid-1940s, Julian's work at Glidden had won him national acclaim. With the

outbreak of World War II, his Alpha protein became the chief ingredient in "bean soup" -- a

fire-fighting foam credited with saving thousands of servicemen's lives. He was even

featured in Reader's Digest (one of America's most popular magazines).

Helen Printy: It was the beginning of White America's exposure to Dr. Percy Julian and how he had to

fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America. And in the context of the

times, it made him a symbol.

James Shoffner: Here was a person who looked like me. Who was not only in the field but succeeding

magnificently at the top of his profession. That was profound.

Narrator: Julian was named to the boards of half-a-dozen colleges and universities. He was showered

with awards and honorary degrees and sought after as a public speaker. The NAACP

awarded him its prestigious Spingarn Medal previously given to W.E.B. Du Bois, George

Washington Carver, Paul Robeson, and Thurgood Marshall. And the Chicago Sun-Times

named him "Chicagoan of the Year."

As Julian's stature grew, so did his personal responsibilities. Anna had given birth to a

son (Percy Jr.) in 1940 and a daughter (Faith) 4 years later. With so many demands on

Percy's time, Anna shouldered the parenting duties. "For the children," she later wrote, "an

after-dinner visit with their father was a rare treat."

Percy Julian Jr.: I hardly remember a weekend when he didn't work. But the time you had was quality

time.

Narrator: By the end of the 1940s, the family had outgrown their Maywood home. The Julians began

looking for a bigger one in a neighborhood that suited their new social status. They set their

sights on Oak Park -- one of Chicago's most affluent and exclusive suburbs.

The village was home to doctors, lawyers and wealthy businessmen. It had a reputation

as a town for the educated and enlightened.

Virginia Cassin (an Oak Park, Illinois resident): It's always been a community that was...had a little

sense of its importance as far as being, perhaps, a cut above others.

21

V/O MAN (Radio): Thanks to our good friends, the makers of Broadcast Brand corned beef hash.

Narrator: Oak Park even had its own radio show, familiar to listeners all over America as "Breakfast

with the Johnsons".

V/O CHILD (Radio): Daddy, I have to give a report in school. So I'm going to give it to you.

Cliff Johnson (CBS radio host): These days, they'd call it "reality radio". And that's what it was. 7:30

in the morning Monday through Friday. The microphones were all over the house. The

children would wander in,and the milkman would come in. We talked about us and the

world around us.

Narrator: The world around the Johnsons was cultured, privileged, and white. The few African-

Americans who lived in Oak Park worked as servants and laborers.

Roberta L. Raymond (sociologist): When the Julians came along, I'm sure that this was a shock to

many people who lived in Oak Park. Here they are -- 2 very well-educated people, both

with Ph.D.s. He, a very successful chemist and businessman. And they purchased a house -

- a large house -- on a large lot.

Cliff Johnson: There was some nasty tongue-wagging going on. "Who do these people think they are

that they can move in here and take over our neighborhood?"

Narrator: Trouble began even before the Julians could move in.

Percy Julian Jr.: My dad was out of town and my mom got a call from the Oak Park Fire Department.

"Something has occurred at the house," this is the fire department, "could you please come."

Even as a 10-year-old, I knew that this was arson. There was no attempt to hide this, to

make it look like an accident. I see these bottles -- these huge bottles -- and I could smell

gasoline. The stairs were soaked all the way up to the second floor.

I think my mother was scared. But if she was, she didn't show it.

They lit the fuse on the outside. The door caught on but it was sealed so well that the

flames couldn't get under the door. But had the bottles caught, the flames would have gone

right up the stairwell -- a natural chimney -- and the house could've been a total loss.

And I looked at my mom and I said, "Why would anybody do this?" And she explained

it. They didn't want us to live there and didn't want us to live there because of the color of

our skin.

Narrator: Percy Julian -- now accomplished, affluent, ambitious -- was face-to-face with the same

violence that African-Americans all over Chicago were encountering as they tried to move

into white neighborhoods.

Vernon Jarrett (newspaper reporter): After the War, when the ghetto was bursting at the seams and

people trying to move out, every first Negro, they said, to move in a block was going to

catch hell. A mob would be out there to greet you. I've personally seen it, covered it.

Narrator: There were no mobs in Oak Park. But the arson was a clear warning that some in the

community would stop at nothing to keep the Julians out.

22

Percy Julian Jr.: The arson attempt did not succeed in intimidating my mom and dad. Nor could it

have. They were simply not intimidatable.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay.

To leave would have been cowardly and wrong. The right of a people to live where they

want to without fear is more important than my science. I was ready to give up my science

and my life to bring a halt to this senseless terrorism.

Narrator: The Julians moved in. And when a few months passed with no further trouble, Percy and

Anna felt confident enough to go out of town, leaving the children with a babysitter.

Percy Julian Jr.: The first that my parents saw of it was when they saw it in the paper the next day with

me pointing to the hole in the ground.

Cliff Johnson: I'll never forget the morning my daughter Sandra said, "Daddy, they bombed my friend

Percy Julian's house last night." And then she said, "Daddy, why did they do that? Why

would they bomb their house?" I put on a record because I didn't have the answer.

Percy Julian Jr.: My dad was angry when he came home -- I mean really angry -- and clearly ready to

fight. He looked at this as an attempt to murder his kids. For him, there was nothing

redeemable about them at all. I'm taking this in like there's no tomorrow.

And actually, you know how everything has a good side? The good side was as a kid, I

got to spend more time with my dad and got to stay up late 'cause we'd sit in the tree outside.

He'd sit there with a shotgun. And we'd talk about why someone would want to do this and

how wrong it was and how stupid it was.

Narrator: The Julians would continue to receive threatening letters for years after. No one was ever

arrested. Many Oak Park residents were horrified at the violence against the family.

Virginia Cassin: I think people were shocked that anyone should be treated that way. And there were

people who came forward to say there are a lot of us that don't feel that way.

Cliff Johnson: There was at least 200-or-more people that marched right up in front of the Julian house

on East Avenue and said "He stays, he stays."

Narrator: Even as events in Oak Park threatened to upend his personal life, a new scientific challenge

was drawing Percy Julian into one of the great medical dramas of the 20th

Century.

At the center was one of the oldest and most painful of human diseases -- rheumatoid

arthritis.

Charles Plotz (rheumatologist): Arthritis is a generic word for inflammation of the joints and

encompasses a lot of different diseases. But the disease that truly inflames the joint and

causes destruction of the cartilage and the bone within the joint is rheumatoid arthritis.

Narrator: Scientists had been seeking a cure for rheumatoid arthritis for hundreds of years. But by the

middle of the 20th

Century, those efforts had yielded only a bizarre assortment of mostly

ineffective treatments. Chin slings, gold injections, mineral baths, cobra venom, bee stings,

even electricity.

23

Charles Plotz: People would swear by them. But nothing over the long run worked.

Narrator: The situation changed dramatically at the 1949 annual meeting of American rheumatologists.

Philip Hench of the Mayo Clinic presented a film showing how arthritis patients responded

to a new drug called Compound E and later named "cortisone."

Charles Plotz: They were severely crippled, having to drink by holding a cup in both hands. And Philip

Hench gave them an injection and within 12-to-24 hours the same patients were having no

difficulty at all. It was one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened in

medicine. You didn't need a double-blind study; you just saw it happen. And the audience

stood up and cheered.

Well, every patient with rheumatoid arthritis immediately wanted to be put on this magic

drug!

Narrator: The problem was that there was none to be had. Hench had performed his tests with a few

precious grams of cortisone sent to him by Lewis Sarett, a young chemist at Merck.

Sarett had worked for years to synthesize cortisone from the bile of slaughtered oxen.

But his chemical pathway was the most complex ever attempted in industry, requiring more

than 30 steps. And thousands of cattle carcasses would be needed to make enough cortisone

to treat a single patient for a year.

To treat the millions suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, scientists would need to find

more a plentiful starting material and simplify the process of producing cortisone. Chemists

from all over the World sprang to the challenge, launching one of the most intensive

research efforts in the history of Medicine.

Julian threw himself into the effort.

John Kenly Smith: The only reason that Glidden is in the great cortisone race is because of Percy

Julian. He knows this chemistry and so he can establish a position for them. The American

pharmaceutical industry after World War II is not the giant that we know of today. This

business is really just getting going. So there is room for entrepreneurs in this period.

Narrator: One of those entrepreneurs was Carl Djerassi, then a young chemist at Syntex, the small

Mexican company that made hormones from yams.

Carl Djerassi ( a Syntex chemist): Julian and I were competitors and we were in this race with people at

Harvard, and at Oxford, and in Zurich, and at Merck, and I mean all the major companies.

It was one time when basic research in industry competed on equal terms with that in

universities.

Narrator: The prize that these chemists were after was not actually a drug but a natural hormone.

Cortisone is one of the many hormones made by the adrenal glands (2 small organs that lie

atop the kidneys). Small amounts of cortisone are always circulating in the bloodstream

controlling the body's responses to stress and inflammation. But much larger doses of

cortisone were needed to relieve the symptoms of arthritis.

24

Julian hoped to make cortisone from soybeans just as he had the sex hormones. Like

progesterone, cortisone had the same four interlocking rings of carbon known as the steroid

nucleus. But cortisone has an unusual feature. One of its Oxygen atoms is in what chemists

call "position 11". Julian set out to make cortisone by first synthesizing an almost identical

compound called Reichstein's Substance S or "Compound S".

Percy Julian (dramatization): Look at the 2 formulae. Compound S differs from cortisone by one lone

little Oxygen atom. And it couldn't possibly be so strikingly different in properties, I

thought. And if it is, why in the devil did nature have to put so much in the adrenal glands?

Well, if you really think Nature is smart, your guess would be that it's there as a

reservoir from which the adrenals can make cortisone as the body needs it by simply

sticking in this one Oxygen atom.

Narrator: Julian hoped to convert Compound S into cortisone as the body does. But he knew that

inserting that one Oxygen atom in exactly the right place would not be a simple matter.

Gregory Petsko: In the body, there's a special enzyme that knows how to do this and does it very

elegantly in a simple reaction. But to do this chemically in the lab in large quantities was

fiendishly difficult.

Dagmar Ringe: In the laboratory, in order to add any atom to this Carbon atom requires severe

conditions. High heat, high pressure, very reactive reagents that will attack this atom. The

difficulty with those conditions is that they will attack every other carbon atom on this

skeleton as well.

Gregory Petsko: You want to put the Oxygen only in that position. It doesn't do you any good to put it

there if, simultaneously, you put it somewhere else where it's not supposed to be.

Narrator: Chemists across the world faced the same challenge. Whatever material they started with --

plant or animal -- they had to find a way to insert that one Oxygen atom into just the right

position. This was the single biggest obstacle to making cortisone.

As Julian struggled to find a solution, Glidden executives were losing patience with his

Compound S approach.

Gregory Petsko: It's hard to read another chemist's mind. But I think that Julian probably knew that

this was so close to the final structure of cortisone that if he could make Substance S in large

quantities inexpensively, he would eventually -- or someone would eventually -- find a way

to insert that troublesome Oxygen into the 11 position because that was the only remaining

step needed to convert that substance into the full-blown hormone cortisone.

Narrator: But the problem of inserting that one Oxygen atom continued to frustrate chemists for more

than 2 years. The cortisone shortage became a crisis as the price topped $4,000 an ounce --

100 times the price of gold.

Charles Plotz: I would get requests from all over the country: "Can't you get me some cortisone? Can't

you get me a little cortisone for me? For my aunt? For my patient?" And I couldn't get it

for me or for anybody.

25

Narrator: Finally in the summer of 1951, 4 teams of chemists announced they had found new ways to

make cortisone. The winners included teams from Harvard, Merck, and Syntex.

Carl Djerassi: We got an enormous amount of publicity including LIFE magazine and places like this.

And that put Syntex on the scientific map.

Narrator: But the chemists' glory was short-lived. 6 months later, they were upstaged by a surprising

discovery from scientists at Upjohn in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

V/O (Film Clip): From laboratories in Michigan comes the new process for making unlimited

quantities of cortisone.

Carl Djerassi: That bubble of conceit and pride and pleasure was completely punctured when we

discovered there were these yokels in Kalamazoo who -- in one step -- did something that

took us 15 steps -- very clever steps -- to do.

Narrator: These so-called "yokels" had discovered a common mold that could effortlessly insert an

Oxygen atom into the 11 position.

Gregory Petsko: Upjohn figured out that they could do it by a fermentation process. In other words, it

wasn't done in a chemistry lab at all. It was done by a microorganism that possessed an

enzyme that was capable -- just like the human body is capable -- of attaching an Oxygen in

exactly the right place.

Narrator: Upjohn's discovery was the breakthrough that would end the cortisone shortage. Its mold

could work its oxygen-inserting magic on a range of steroid materials including Julian's

Compound S.

Gregory Petsko: All of a sudden, Substance S was very important. This compound -- that didn't have

any particular important biological activities of its own -- became ideal as a starting material

to produce cortisone. And Julian was sitting on the process to make that.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Many well-meaning people have exaggerated my contribution to the

chemistry of the cortisone family of drugs. I've even read somewhere that I was "the

discoverer of cortisone." Not so. But we made a good choice, indeed, in choosing to

synthesize Compound S as our first endeavor. Cortisone could now be made from

Compound S simply by dumping it into a tank, throwing in a microorganism, and fishing

out cortisone after the organism has done its work.

Narrator: But Julian's Compound S was not the only material Upjohn's mold could transform into

cortisone.

Carl Djerassi: Suddenly, Upjohn came to Syntex -- I still remember because I was there -- and said,

"Would you quote us the cost of progesterone at a ton level." Well, we were completely

flabbergasted. At that time, still, the World demand was a few hundred kilos.

Narrator: The request could mean only one thing. Upjohn had decided to produce cortisone from

progesterone made by Syntex and not from Julian's Compound S.

Syntex had a big advantage. Its starting material -- the Mexican yam -- was a richer

source of steroids than the soybean. So cortisone made in this way was cheaper.

26

But other companies were also gearing up to produce cortisone. Julian could still win

their business if he abandoned soybeans and made Compound S from the Mexican yam.

But when Julian appealed to Glidden's chairman to make the switch, the answer was "No."

Percy Julian (dramatization): I begged him to hold on. We could set up a simple yam processing plant

in Mexico and with Glidden's influence we could soon be masters of the field. But he had

other plans for me in paint and varnish chemistry, new paint to prevent icing on airplane

propellers, new shortenings that didn't spatter.

John Kenly Smith: I think the steroid work that Julian was doing was just one of those little businesses

that no longer were seen as important to the company and its future direction.

Percy Julian (dramatization): They sent me to Europe for a vacation, to forget about it. And on my

return, the chairman announced that Glidden was going out of the steroid business

altogether.

Helen Printy: This was a blow to the heart of Doc. And he said he didn't know whether he'd be able to

stand that because if there was no steroid research, there was nothing that he could really

interest himself in.

Narrator: Joyce licensed Compound S to Pfizer and Syntex and ordered Julian to teach their chemists

how to use the process he'd invented.

Helen Printy: And things just kept getting worse and worse and worse until finally it just became

untenable for him.

Narrator: In late 1953, Percy Julian walked away from the job into which he'd put the most productive

years of his life.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And when I left Glidden, I left behind 109 patents for which I received

$109 and other valuable considerations.

Narrator: One of those patents was for Compound S. Just as Julian predicted, it went on to become a

key ingredient in the production of cortisone, helping to make the drug available to millions

at a reasonable price.

Gregory Petsko: The fact that Julian could do what he did while working in a paint company strikes me

as just remarkable. He didn't just do these things because glory would be his if he

succeeded. There always is, in Julian's work, this sense of aiming for something big

because it's going to be useful for people.

Narrator: But to fulfill his ambition, Julian would now have to reinvent himself as a businessman in

one of the most cutthroat industries in America.

Within a few months Julian was back on his feet as president of his own chemical

company in Franklin Park outside Chicago.

Helen Printy: We had left the Glidden Company and moved out to this place that was loaded with rats

and mice and everything else. You couldn't eat your lunch without a mouse coming out.

27

Peter Walton: Working conditions, I guess, would be considered primitive.

Narrator: But for Julian it was the chance of a lifetime. After 18 years at Glidden, he was his own

boss, free to focus on work that excited him.

His plan for success was simple. Julian Laboratories would make steroid intermediates -

- compounds that were often just one step short of a finished product. The big

pharmaceutical companies would buy them because Julian could make them faster and

cheaper than they could.

From his old friends at Upjohn, Julian quickly landed a contract for $2 million worth of

progesterone. More business followed from Ciba, Pfizer, Merck, and others. There was just

one obstacle. Syntex -- the Mexican company that now dominated the hormone business.

Syntex controlled the supply of the Mexican yam (or barbasco) root. Julian needed an

extract from the root to make his intermediates cheaply. But Syntex refused to sell him any.

It was a setback that threatened the company.

Peter Walton: Having put it all on the line with these major pharmaceutical companies, he had to

deliver the goods. Had to.

Narrator: To get around Syntex, Julian would have to build his own $300,000 barbasco processing

plant in Mexico.

Peter Walton: Dr. Julian didn't have the necessary capital himself. The conventional normal banking

sources were off limits to people of color, period!

Narrator: Using personal savings and money from friends and private investors, Julian was able to

build the plant. But then, another roadblock. The Mexican government -- closely tied to

Syntex -- refused him a permit to harvest the barbasco root. His expensive Mexican factory

was useless.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And there we stood with our beautiful plant, our beautifully lighted water

tower with Laboratorios de Julian de Mexico emblazoned on it, a mausoleum. I sat in a

hotel in Mexico City wondering whether I should shoot my brains out.

Peter Walton: There was enormous pressure on Dr. Julian because the financial stakes were huge, were

huge. He had everything invested between Franklin Park and Mexico. And so this was a

pressure, pressure time.

Percy Julian (dramatization): And then a strange thing happened. There was a knock on the door and

in came a man named Abraham Zlotnik. A man that I had helped out of Hitler's Germany.

Abe said he was sure the yam grew in Guatemala and he volunteered to make an expedition

for me. I told him I was broke, ruined. I didn't know when I could pay him back. But he

said "You've already paid me back."

Narrator: Zlotnik was as good as his word. His expedition found the barbasco root in Guatemala.

Julian now had the raw material he needed to achieve his goal -- making steroid drugs

available to all who needed them.

28

James Letton: He always talked about being able to lower the cost of some of these anti-inflammatory

agents -- these steroids -- so that the common man could buy them.

Narrator: Even if it meant lower profits for Julian Laboratories. One year his chemists found a way to

quadruple the yield on a product on which they were barely breaking even.

James Letton: I thought, personally, that that was a good opportunity to recover some profits from the

low yields of the previous year. Instead, he dropped the price of this stuff from $4,000-a-

kilo down to about $400-a-kilo. And I couldn't understand why he would do that.

Helen Printy: He wanted to make money. But he also wanted things to be available for people.

Narrator: Much of Julian's own money was still tied up in his idle Mexican plant. To make good on

that investment, he would have to resolve some unfinished business with an old rival.

V/O Man (Senate Hearing dramatization): Would Dr. Percy Julian come forward?

Narrator: Julian believed Syntex had used its influence with the Mexican government to keep his

factory from opening. After other American companies made similar charges, the Senate

held public hearings in 1956. Julian was the star witness.

Hollabaugh (Senate Hearing dramatization): Was there any company in Mexico objecting to your

getting a permit?

Percy Julian (dramatization): It became very evident that the Syntex Company was objecting to the

permit. In fact, Dr. Somlo told me he would fight to the last to keep me and anyone else out

of Mexico.

Narrator: As a result of the "wonder drug" hearings, the Justice Department took action against Syntex.

Julian was finally able to open his Mexican plant. But the mounting pressures of running a

business left him little time to savor the hard-won victory.

Every month, there were shipments to make and severe financial penalties for missed

deadlines.

Peter Walton: We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment. A small

company, limited resources, and dealing with a huge industry.

Earl Dailey (a Julian Laboratories chemist): There were many occasions where 2:00, 3:00 in the

morning would come and you'd still be in the laboratory, working.

Peter Walton: When I complained about the lack of sleep, Dr. Julian advised me that sleep could be

dangerous for my health. I could die in my sleep and "while you're contemplating that, go

back out to the plant and continue to work. We have a shipment to get out."

James Letton: But there was an unusual sense of loyalty that made people work and want to see him

and the company successful. How else could you get a crew to work 24 hours a day? This

sort of thing.

29

Narrator: And successful it was. Julian Laboratories would eventually make its founder a millionaire,

one of the wealthiest black businessmen in America. For his chemists, the reward was an

opportunity hard to find anywhere else -- a chance to work in their chosen field.

James Letton: When I was looking for a job, some people made excuses. And then there were some

that just said "We don't hire you people."

Tom West (a Julian Laboratories chemist): They told me that I was too well qualified to take a job. I

felt that they were saying "Come back maybe another time. Come back when you're white."

Narrator: Scores of chemists, unwelcome elsewhere, would use their years with Julian as a springboard

to careers in industry and academia.

Peter Walton: I'm proud to say that our laboratories in Franklin Park employed more black chemists

than any other facility in America. On the other hand, for such a small organization to have

such a significant role in true integration is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in

America.

Narrator: Outside Julian's lab, America was still a nation divided by race. And Julian was constantly

reminded of it, even at meetings of the American Chemical Society.

Edward Meyer (a Glidden chemist): When we went to the meeting he said, "Ed, grab me by the arm,

when we go in, so people will know that we're together." Because he was afraid that they

would -- him being a black man -- throw him out.

Narrator: Neither wealth nor fame could insulate Julian from bigotry. But with success came the

chance to do something about it. Increasingly, he set aside his science to fight for racial

equality.

He joined the NAACP and the Urban League in their battle against discrimination in

jobs and housing. He led a national fundraising campaign to support civil rights lawyers.

And in speech after speech, he preached that education and the pursuit of excellence -- the

hallmarks of his own life -- were the keys to black advancement.

But many younger African Americans were impatient with traditional tactics and

rejected the sermons of Julian's generation.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Our children and our grandchildren saw all of this and suffered for their

oft-times "Uncle Tom" parents who seemed to be doing nothing about it. Finally, their pent-

up agony exploded on us.

Percy Julian Jr.: I would say, "Explain this to me: how is it that this is all going to change?" He would

say, "Well, it will. There are lawyers and they are going to fight for change. And if you set

an example, things will change." Well, I don't have forever.

Narrator: In the1960s, Julian's son drove to Nashville to join the effort to desegregate the city's lunch

counters.

Percy Julian Jr.: On the one hand, he was very proud. But on the other, he was very scared. One time

he said to me, "You know, this is not a game. These people are playing for real." And my

response was "So are we."

30

Narrator: The 1960s were an awakening for Julian. He came to see that the nation could not afford to

wait for the old ways to work.

Percy Julian (dramatization): For more than a century since the end of slavery, we have watched the

denial of elemental liberty to millions of black people in our southland.

Percy Julian Jr.: I think he saw that things were moving so fast that if the country didn't change, there

was going to be serious, serious trouble.

Narrator: By the late 1960s, Julian had come to support the more confrontational tactics of his son's

generation.

Percy Julian Jr.: My father wrote later that it wasn't going to be enough just to be a model citizen, to

be educated, to do all the things that anybody could possibly expect of you. Because none

of that would ever change the fact that you still couldn't go and eat in a restaurant that didn't

want to serve you.

Percy Julian (dramatization): Branded, first, unfit to spend their money for food or drink in public

places along with other Americans; denied the ballot and confined to ghettoes that stifled

hope and ambition, victims of murder of the mind, heart and spirit. This is the story of the

American Negro.

Narrator: Percy Julian's own story now entered its final chapter. Born in 1899, he was now in his 70s

and a proud grandfather.

Katherine Julian, M.D. (Percy Julian's granddaughter): I definitely was aware that my grandfather was

special. I remember playing with a doll that had been sent to him by a woman and the story

was told me why it had been sent. She had such bad arthritis that she couldn't use her hands.

And after using cortisone, she was able to knit this doll and sent it to him. And I remember

holding the doll and playing with the doll and realizing that he had helped her. And that that

was something that was really special.

Narrator: For his contributions to humanity, Julian received 18 honorary degrees and more than a

dozen civic and scientific awards.

Bernhard Witkop: There was hardly any college that didn't try to honor itself by naming Percy Julian

as an honorary Ph.D. because that was the time when people tried to make up for past

injustice.

Narrator: Julian's longtime friend Bernhard Witkop envisioned a higher honor. He secretly began a

campaign to elect Julian to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. It was an uphill

battle.

Bernhard Witkop: We had, sometimes, prejudicial talk in the Academy by old timers. Some were very

famous people and Nobel laureates who couldn't get used to the new situation.

Narrator: But Witkop persisted and in 1973, Julian received an unexpected phone call from the

Academy's home secretary.

31

Bernhard Witkop: He said, "Sir, may I inform you that you have just been elected a member of the

National Academy. Congratulations."

Narrator: Julian was only the second African-American to be elected. It was the crowning recognition

of 40 years of chemical research.

Ned Heindel: If you look at Percy Julian's career, you can say if this man had not been black, he could

have been a chaired professor at any Ivy or Big Ten institution. The breadth of his

understanding of Chemistry and his fire in the belly to produce so many results in such a

short period of time -- this is Nobel Laureate stuff.

Narrator: Looking back in the autobiography that he would never finish, Julian offered his own

assessment of his life in Science.

Percy Julian (dramatization): I feel that my own good Country robbed me of the chance for some of the

great experiences that I would have liked to live through. Instead, I took a job where I could

get one and tried to make the best of it. I have been, perhaps, a good chemist. But not the

chemist that I dreamed of being.

Narrator: In April 1975, a week after his 76th birthday, Percy Julian died of cancer. His pallbearers

included the chemists who had been his friends and colleagues.

Every year, the U.S. Postal Service issues a commemorative stamp to honor an African-

American leader. In 1993, the choice was Percy Julian.

Helen Printy: As a human being, I think that he was a source of inspiration to many, many, many

people.

Narrator: In 1999, the American Chemical Society recognized Julian's synthesis of the glaucoma drug

physostigmine as one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry.

The plaque is housed in the new Percy Julian Science Center at DePauw.

Gregory Robinson: For him to have accomplished what he did with the resources that he had is still

amazing.

Narrator: Across the World today, millions of people benefit from steroid medications based on the

chemistry of plants. Some of these drugs are still made from soybeans using chemical steps

much like those Percy Julian pioneered.

Gregory Petsko: Here was a man who not only had to overcome the disadvantages of his race but who

also throughout his entire life was in a situation that was never ideal for doing the big things

he was trying to do. Looking over his life, one has a sense that here is a man of great

determination. And it's a determination not just to succeed but a determination to make a

difference, to make a contribution.

James Anderson: His story is really a contradictory one. It's 2 stories. It is a story of great

accomplishments, of heroic efforts and overcoming tremendous odds. But it's also a story of

talent squandered, of potential stifled.

32

It's a story about this Country. It's a story about who we are and what we stand for. And

the challenges that have been there and the challenges that are still with us.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/julian/time-nf.html

Percy Julian's Career Milestones by Rima Chaddha

PBS/NOVA , 02/06/07

Born the grandson of Alabama slaves during segregation in 1899 and facing a lifetime of personal

and professional challenges, Percy Lavon Julian nevertheless went on to become one of the 20th

Century's most influential scientists. His work with steroids and alkaloids helped bring about a host of

affordable and effective treatments for diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and glaucoma, benefiting

millions worldwide. Here, examine a sampling of this forgotten chemist's most important scientific and

medical breakthroughs.

Doctorate by alkaloid (1929-1931) In 1929, Percy Julian won the opportunity to

pursue a dream he had held for more than a

decade: a doctorate in chemistry. Funded by a

grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he

enrolled at the University of Vienna and began

work on alkaloids. His task was to isolate and

identify the active ingredient in the Austrian

shrub Corydalis cava -- an alkaloid that scientists

had found could soothe pain and calm heart

palpitations. This meant breaking the molecule

apart atom-by-atom and then deducing its

structure. A daunting job at the time for even the

most experienced chemists. Julian succeeded

and in 1931 he became only the 4th

African-

American in history to gain a Ph.D. in

Chemistry. He returned to the States, ready to

launch a career in Chemistry (including later

seminal work using another alkaloid called

physostigmine from the calabar bean, left).

Chemical tour de force (1932-1935)

Not long after his return from Vienna, Julian suddenly

faced personal and professional problems that threatened to end

his career just as it was beginning. In characteristically bold

fashion, he resolved to take on a challenge that could save or

destroy him as a chemist: synthesizing physostigmine. This

alkaloid proved effective in treating glaucoma, a disease

responsible for 15 percent of all cases of blindness in the

United States. Any scientist who could fully synthesize the

alkaloid in a lab would receive considerable International

attention. But pursuing physostigmine was risky. Leading

organic chemist Sir Robert Robinson had already published 9

33

papers on the alkaloid and Julian chanced committing professional suicide by challenging the expert's

findings. In the end, Julian and colleague Josef Pikl proved Robinson in error and completed the

synthesis. It was a coup that many chemists still marvel at today.

Breaking into industry (1936)

His success with physostigmine led directly to

Julian landing the position of director of research at

Chicago's Glidden Company. It was a stunning

achievement given that most black chemists were all

but entirely blocked from industry during the 1930s.

In his 17 years at Glidden, Julian would obtain over

100 patents, thanks mostly to the versatile soybean

plant. Using this so-called "miracle bean", he

developed dozens of products from water-based paints

to paper coating to protein-rich foods, soon generating

millions in revenue for the company.

Stigmasterol (1939)

One of Julian's greatest scientific

accomplishments resulted from an accident

that could have cost him his job at Glidden.

Water leaked into a tank filled with $200,000

worth of pure soybean oil, causing the liquid to

spoil and a white sludge to form. Within the

sludge, however, lay crystals that Julian

recognized as stigmasterol, a plant steroid that

could be converted into the pregnancy

hormone progesterone. Doctors prescribed

progesterone to women in an attempt to curb

miscarriages. But until Julian's discovery, the

drug was simply too costly for many patients

to afford. Although he was not the first to

convert stigmasterol into progesterone, Julian

was the first to produce the hormone

affordably and in bulk. Through this

achievement and later hormonal research,

Julian helped launch the steroid industry

whose products would eventually include

cortisone and the birth-control pill.

"Bean Soup" (1942)

34

Even as he became a major player in the lucrative human

sex hormone game, Julian continued his work with the

soybean. In fact, the soy protein he developed as a paper

coating for Glidden ended up playing a key role in saving

lives during World War II. Glidden had shipped some of

Julian's protein to a Pennsylvania company which used it to

develop a fire-fighting product called Aero-Foam. During

the war, the United States Navy applied the foam to oil and

gas fires on board aircraft carriers and other ships,

effectively saving thousands of sailors from serious injury or

death. Affectionately nicknamed "bean soup," Aero-Foam -

- like later foaming agents -- worked by floating on top of a

burning liquid, breaking contact between the flames and the

fuel's surface.

"Wonder Drug" (1949)

Scientists from Minnesota's Mayo Clinic made

headlines in 1949 when they discovered that the

steroid cortisone could ease the symptoms of

rheumatoid arthritis. This painful disease (which

even today affects more than 2 million Americans)

cripples patients by inflaming their joints and

destroying cartilage. But cortisone was extremely

scarce and the sudden demand created by the Mayo

Clinic's dramatic announcement drove prices up

over $4,000-an-ounce and sent scientists

scrambling for new ways to make it. While many

chemists attempted to produce the chemical from

scratch, Julian tried a seemingly simpler approach:

synthesizing an almost identical steroid called

'Compound S' which needed just one oxygen atom

to become cortisone. Scientists from Michigan's

Upjohn Company soon discovered that a common

mold could provide Compound S with the needed atom, eventually making the steroid a key ingredient

in cortisone production, just as Julian had predicted.

Julian Laboratories (1953)

While Julian was conducting his hormonal research in the 1940s,

Penn State chemist Russell Marker had discovered an even

cheaper source of artificial steroids than the soybean: the

Mexican yam. Marker's discovery became the foundation of

Syntex, the Mexican company that would eventually overtake

Glidden as the leading manufacturer of steroid hormones. In

1953 after Upjohn's discovery of the oxygen-inserting mold,

Julian realized that Glidden could still become a leading maker

of cortisone if he could make his Compound S from the Mexican

yam. But when he appealed to Glidden's managers to let him

open a yam processing plant in Mexico, they turned him down.

Risking his career once again, Julian left Glidden in 1953 to form

35

Julian Laboratories and open his own Mexican plant. At Julian Labs, he continued his work in steroids

and established a haven for other black chemists, hiring more than any other company in America.

Later he sold his business for $2.3 million, becoming one of the wealthiest black entrepreneurs in the

nation.

Gaining recognition (1973-present)

In 1973, after more than 4 decades of chemical research,

Julian became only the second African-American elected

to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest

honors awarded to scientists in any field. Over time, he

received 18 honorary degrees and over a dozen civic and

scientific awards. In 1993, the U.S. Postal Service issued

a commemorative stamp in his honor. In 1999, the

American Chemical Society recognized Julian's synthesis

of the glaucoma drug physostigmine as one of the top 25

achievements in the history of American chemistry, a

true testament to the importance of his work.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/julian-the-trailblazer.html

Julian the Trailblazer by Peter Tyson

PBS/NOVA 02/06/07

Percy Julian was one of the great scientists of the 20

th Century. In a chemistry career spanning 4

decades, he made many valuable discoveries for which he was awarded dozens of patents, 18 honorary

degrees, and membership to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (only the second African-

American bestowed such an honor).

Yet Julian's achievements as a trailblazer for black chemists, while less well-known, are no less

remarkable. Growing up when racial discrimination factored into every aspect of life for blacks in

America from riding a bus to getting a job, Julian persevered to realize his dreams. And when he finally

"arrived" as a successful chemist and businessman, he did not lose sight of the challenges that fellow

blacks still faced. He became a mentor to scores of young black chemists and later in life an inspiration

for thousands as a civil-rights leader and speaker.

36

As the late Vernon Jarrett, one of the nation's leading commentators on race relations, put it: "This

man is Exhibit A of determination and never giving up. I think he's a role model not only for blacks but

for all races."

A Childhood of Racism

Julian felt the sting of discrimination early on. Born in 1899, he grew up in Alabama where two of

his grandparents had been slaves and where "Jim Crow" laws of segregation still held sway. Few

African-Americans received education beyond the 8th

grade and every day they walked a tightrope in the

face of deeply entrenched racism.

"You knew that if you said the wrong thing or went in the wrong door or drank out of the wrong

water fountain, any of those things could lead to your death," says James Anderson, an historian at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Julian knew this firsthand. When he was 12, he came

across a lynched body hanging from a tree.

Julian's parents and Julian himself at a young age understood that the way out from beneath this

smothering blanket of oppression lay through education. Many whites of the day felt that African-

Americans only needed enough schooling to become field hands. Those few "uppity" blacks who did

insist on getting college or graduate degrees should only doctor, teach, or preach to other blacks.

Julian went from a "sub-freshman" (his term) upon entering DePauw

University to valedictorian upon graduation 4 years later (seen here).

Photo credit: Courtesy DePauw University

Julian had broader ideas. With no high school to attend, he did 2 years at a teacher training school

for African-Americans before, providentially, gaining admittance into predominantly white DePauw

University in Indiana. Drastically behind his fellow freshmen academically, Julian went on to graduate

Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class 4 years later. Exhibit A of determination.

If he'd been white, Julian could have stepped straight into the doctoral program of his choice. But no

graduate school would have him, at least initially. Eventually he got a scholarship to attend Harvard

and he earned a master's degree there. But he left before obtaining his doctorate. It's not entirely clear

why. But Anderson suggests one possibility. In those days, the only way that many graduate students

financed their education was by becoming teaching assistants. But the idea of blacks teaching whites

was as anathema at Harvard as anywhere else in the 1920s. Because of this bias, Anderson says, Julian

never got such a position and his tuition money ran out.

In the end, it would take 10 years of Julian's life and even leaving the country to secure his Ph.D.

But he finally succeeded, earning his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1931.

37

A topsy-turvy career

On his return from Vienna that fall things looked more promising for Julian than ever. He returned

to Howard University (the Country's leading African-American university) where he had taught before

going to Vienna. He was made full professor and chairman of the chemistry department and he set out

to create a center for chemical research. He was now America's foremost black chemist.

But Julian got caught up in university politics and for reasons that, again, remain somewhat obscure,

he was forced to resign. He returned to his alma mater DePauw as a researcher, soon unable even to

teach. His career lay in a shambles.

Another man might have given up the struggle and resigned himself to his fate. But Julian,

characteristically, did just the opposite. He took on a high-stakes research project that would either

secure or destroy his reputation. He set out to synthesize (or create artificially in the lab) an alkaloid

called physostigmine used to treat glaucoma, even though a leading English chemist at Oxford

University had already published 9 papers on the subject and seemed well on his way to achieving the

synthesis. Julian went so far as to state in a paper that the Oxford chemist Sir Robert Robinson had

made a major error. It was all or nothing. If he was wrong, his career would likely suffer a mortal blow.

Julian prevailed. Indeed, chemists around the world recognized his elegant synthesis of

physostigmine as a milestone in American chemical history. Again, if he'd been white, universities

would have fallen over backwards to get him on their staff. But in those days, traditionally white

institutions of higher education would not tolerate having an African-American on their faculties,

Anderson says.

Industry, to which Julian then turned, was no more enlightened. When DuPont invited Julian and his

Austrian colleague Josef Pikl who had come to the States with him for interviews, they offered Pikl a

job but could only apologize to Julian: "We didn't know you were a Negro." In 1936, the Institute of

Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin was on the verge of hiring Julian when they realized that an

old statute prohibited Negroes from staying overnight in the town.

Mentor

Fortunately for Julian, the vice president of Glidden (a manufacturer of paints and other products) sat

on the board of the Appleton institute. He had been seeking a talented chemist to run his new research

lab in Chicago and he knew a good thing when he saw it. He promptly hired Julian who became the first

black chemist to direct a chemical research laboratory. It was a coup of almost unprecedented

proportions for an African-American in 1936.

"The idea that you could break out of that notion that blacks could only teach and work with blacks

and find a job or a career in some other area was almost completely foreign and unheard of," says James

Shoffner, one of many African-Americans whom Julian inspired to become a chemist. "When I saw that

here was a person who looked like me who was not only in the field but succeeding magnificently, at the

top of his profession, that was profound."

Over the next 4 decades, Julian would hire and train dozens of young black chemists. "As he

pointed out to me, it was only natural that when he had control of his own destiny, he would offer this

opportunity to fellow black chemists," says Peter Walton, a long-time Julian employee.

38

Julian had what Walton terms a "natural farmland" from which to draw this talent. Having taught at

Howard, Fisk, and West Virginia universities, Julian had a network of contacts throughout the black

college system that he used to recruit promising African-American chemists. Many of these young

scientists used their years with Julian at Glidden or later at Julian's own company Julian Laboratories as

a springboard to distinguished careers in industry or academia.

Julian at his desk at Glidden where he worked from 1936

to 1954

Photo credit: Courtesy Diane Korling

Civil-Rights Leader

The burden of intolerance did not lift for Julian with his hiring at Glidden, of course. Nor with his

success did he forget the prejudice that other blacks less fortunate than himself continued to endure.

Indeed, the older he got, the more proactive Julian became as an advocate of civil rights. He was, said

Vernon Jarrett, "a bold but subtle race man."

A seminal period for Julian came after he moved his family into the all-white Chicago neighborhood

of Oak Park. He soon began receiving death threats and an arsonist tried to burn down his house. At

first, his fury almost got the better of him. His son Percy Julian Jr. recalls sitting evenings in a tree

shortly after the arson attack with his father who cradled a shotgun in his lap. One can envision how

suddenly Julian's place in history might have evaporated if those who wanted him gone had returned on

one of those nights.

Even vandalism and threatening letters including one that

read "We will not give up, you and your children will be killed if

you do not move" were not enough to intimidate Julian into

leaving Oak Park.

Photo credit: © Chicago Defender Newspaper Library

39

But Julian's anger cooled. He was, Jarrett said, "steaming on racism, but not against individuals" and

he soon chose avenues more befitting his stature and his nature. He started modestly, joining the fair-

housing movement in Oak Park. But soon he began working on a larger canvas, leading a national

fundraising campaign for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and giving interviews and

speeches in which he decried the plight of the black man in America

"Branded, first," Julian railed in one speech, "unfit to spend their money for food or drink in public

places along with other Americans; denied the ballot and confined to ghettos that stifled hope and

ambition, victims of murder of the mind, heart, and spirit. This is the story of the American Negro."

Later in his life when the civil-rights movement was in full swing, Julian came to understand how

younger African-Americans might see him as an accommodationist. By accepting the prevailing notion

that if blacks just worked hard enough they would succeed rather than rebelling against the bigotry

undergirding that sentiment, he and others of his generation might have unwittingly helped perpetuate

the white suppression of black talent, he realized. Julian's own hallmarks -- a focus on education, the

pursuit of excellence, and working within the system (the courts and the legislature) to bring about

change -- were simply no longer enough.

Role Model

His suspicions about himself notwithstanding, Percy Julian's greatest contribution to improving the

status of the black man in America may have been serving as an inspiration. He cleared racist hurdles

all his life, proving how never giving in could pay off. He broke the color barrier in Chemistry a decade

before Jackie Robinson did in baseball. And he went on to found his own company and see it thrive.

After Percy Julian, Shoffner says, nobody could say with any credibility that blacks couldn't do science.

Nor that they couldn't succeed in business. Julian became a millionaire whom the Chicago Sun-Times

once named "Chicagoan of the Year."

Above all, it was his capacity as a mentor to young black chemists. And -- to a lesser but still

significant extent -- to young blacks in general. Vernon Jarrett recalled a time about 5 years before

Julian's death in 1975 when Julian spoke to about 150 black youth at a local NAACP event in Chicago.

The incident offers a snapshot of the man in his prime.

"After we concluded," Jarrett remembered, "1-or- kids came up and wanted to get his autograph

because he was a celebrity. And he says 'No, let's do it this way.' ... He went down the aisle, shaking

hands with every single youngster there. ... He wanted to know their names. ... 'What kind of grades are

you making in school? Do you like to read? Have you ever heard of Frederick Douglass?' ... It just

knocked me out to see this heralded, international figure doing this one-on-one with these black kids."

Exhibit A of determination, ever striving to pass the baton.

To the end of his life, Julian felt passionately about advancing prospects for younger

generations of African-Americans.

Photo credit: Courtesy Norb Teclaw

40

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/julian/producer.html

The Producer's Story: Rediscovering a Forgotten Genius by Stephen Lyons

In 1998, buoyed by the success of the 1996 broadcast of "Einstein Revealed" (a 2-hour biography

that explored Einstein's personal life as well as his science), NOVA set out to launch a bigger project

using similar production techniques. We called it Lives in Science: 4 films that would combine

documentary and drama, each focusing on the life and work of a single scientist, played by an actor

speaking words drawn from the scientist's own writings.

Looking for an African-American scientist whose story would allow us to explore the issue of race

in science, we considered agronomist George Washington Carver, biologist E. E. Just, and blood bank

pioneer Charles Drew among others. But Percy Julian's story stood out. While he had encountered the

same racial obstacles that all black scientists of his generation faced, Julian had overcome them more

successfully than any other African-American in the first half of the 20th

Century.

There was just one problem. No book about Percy Julian existed. When producers set out to make

film biographies, they almost always piggyback on years of research that historians or biographers have

already done. But no science historian had ever studied Julian's career; no biographer had ever told his

story. The literature on Julian consisted of a brief biographical memoir by a longtime friend, chemist

Bernhard Witkop of the National Institutes of Health; a 1946 Reader's Digest profile; a 1993 magazine

article about the Postal Service's decision to name a stamp in Julian's honor; and scattered press

clippings and websites of uncertain reliability.

The making of the television biography of Percy Julian (here seen in

Vienna about 1929) became as much preserving a legacy as producing a

film.

A rare photograph of Julian in his earlier days shows the dapper young

chemist posing with 2 friends in Vienna where he received his doctorate

in 1931.

Getting under way

This was hardly enough to base a 2-hour program on. It meant that before we could even think

about making a film, we'd have to do the kind of original research that normally goes into writing a

book. It was a daunting prospect. Neither director Lew Smith nor I had a background in Chemistry.

41

We didn't know how long the research would take, how much it would cost, or where the money could

come from. The sensible thing would have been to wait for a Julian book to come out. But his story

was so compelling that NOVA swallowed hard and plunged in.

Our faith was soon rewarded. In March 1999, the American Chemical Society held a Julian

centennial symposium at its national meeting. The symposium had been organized by a retired black

chemist named Jim Shoffner whose own career in chemistry had been inspired by Julian's example and

who had long been working to call attention to the Julian story.

As the symposium was wrapping up, Shoffner casually mentioned that NOVA was hoping to

produce a Julian biography and that a NOVA representative was in the audience. I stood up to identify

myself. Minutes later, a man named Bob Lichter approached and introduced himself. "I'm the executive

director of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation," he said, "and we'd like to help."

It was the first sign that others would see the value of telling Percy Julian's story. By the summer of

2000, a grant from the Dreyfus Foundation (one of the many generous funders that would ultimately

support the project) enabled us to get under way.

Witnesses

2 members of the Julian team -- Meredith Woods and Patricia Garcia-Rios -- focused on building the

archival record: combing newspaper and photo archives, libraries, and databases for popular articles,

patent applications, scientific papers, photographs, and archival film that might be useful for the

program. Meanwhile, Lew Smith and I began a series of oral history interviews. Though Julian had

died 25 years earlier, many people who had known him personally were still alive.

In Greencastle, Indiana (seat of Julian's alma mater, DePauw University), we met Jack and Marion

Cook who had worked for years to call attention to the Julian story. The Cooks helped us put together a

list of 20 known "Julian associates". And each time we interviewed one of them, we asked "Who else

should we talk to?"

As the list grew to 30 people, then 40, then 50, two historians from our partners at the Chemical

Heritage Foundation joined in the effort. With tape recorders in hand, we fanned out across the Country

learning everything we could from Julian's family members, friends, former students, and coworkers.

Outside Orlando, Florida, we met 89-year-old Ray Dawson who described in vivid detail the work

he had done as a DePauw undergraduate 65 years earlier to assist Julian in his famous battle with

Oxford's Robert Robinson over the synthesis of physostigmine.

To beat the heat of the Greencastle summer, they had often worked late into the night and then

driven out to a little shanty at the railroad switching yards north of town for coffee and conversation. It

was during one of these late-night talks that Julian told Dawson about his fiancée, Anna Johnson, who

was sending him letters from back East demanding to know "Are you going to marry me or not?"

42

Among the many Julian artifacts turned up during our research was this

handwritten page of notes on the progesterone process, scribbled by

Percy Julian in the late 1950s.

In Ohio, we discovered former Glidden chemists Helen Printy and Earl Dailey. They had had a

falling out with Julian and long ago left the chemical business to open a bar in Cleveland. But when we

found them through an Internet search, all the memories came rushing back. I arrived in town expecting

to do a 3-hour interview but stayed for 3 days.

In Cincinnati, we found Jim Letton who had worked for Julian for

more than a decade before returning to school and earning his doctorate

in Chemistry. He told heartbreaking stories about graduating from

college in 1955 and spending 2 years in a futile search for a job in

Chemistry until he learned of a Chicago firm called Julian Laboratories

where black chemists were welcome.

Jim Letton, a former Julian Laboratories chemist, was one of more than

60 people ultimately interviewed for the program. He is shown here in

1952 while a freshman at Kentucky State.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Julian's son Percy Jr. described in chilling detail the repeated racial attacks

his family had faced after moving into the predominantly white Chicago suburb of Oak Park and his

parents' steely determination to withstand the pressure to move out.

North of Chicago, we visited Wayne Cole who had studied under Julian at DePauw and then served

as his right-hand man at the Glidden Company for more than a decade. At 86, Cole was gaunt, hunch-

backed and unsteady on his feet. But when he opened his mouth, out came sentences of astonishing

clarity and precision. Asked about chemical processes he and Julian had used to treat the soybean 60

years earlier, he described them as if they had happened yesterday.

43

Percy Julian in his lab at DePauw University

in the 1930s. Among his students are Ray

Dawson (to Julian's right) and Wayne Cole

(to his left) whom we interviewed over 60

years later.

Preserving a Legacy

Before long, it dawned on us that we weren't just producing a film. We were preserving the legacy

of one of the most significant scientists in American history, capturing the memories of his closest

associates while there was still time. In the end, we would interview more than 60 people in 13 states.

(We plan to donate the transcripts of our interviews [more than 2,000 pages of them] to a research

archive, a priceless resource for future scholars hoping to study Julian's life and career.)

From all these interviews emerged a portrait of a new Julian. Admirable but also flawed. More

complex, more human, and more real than the heroic figure we had read about in Reader's Digest.

Through these interviews we also discovered whole new aspects of Julian's story. New details about his

Vienna years, his performance as the star witness in Congressional hearings, and his growing

commitment to civil rights, among many others. These new chapters made his story even more dramatic

than the one that had lured us into the project.

But even as our excitement about the Julian story grew, so did our fear that we would lose critical

eyewitnesses before we could begin production.

At this point, Jim Shoffner came to our aid for the second time. Newly elected to the American

Chemical Society's Board of Directors, Shoffner persuaded ACS to award the Julian project a special

grant. The funds allowed us to return to the 15 best storytellers we had found in our initial research and

record broadcast-quality video interviews.

Just in time as it turned out. 5 of those 15 died in the next 3 years. But they live on in the film,

giving the Julian profile an immediacy that is rare in a television biography. To a great extent, his story

is told by the people who knew him best.

These people didn't just share their stories. Many also gave us Julian-related artifacts they had been

holding onto for more than a quarter-century as if waiting for us to come along. These included letters,

postcards, photographs, even an unfinished autobiography Julian had started 40 years before.

Julian's longtime secretary, Joan Bowman, gave us a precious recording of a speech Julian had given

at Indiana University in 1965 (see Julian Speaks). And from Peter Walton (a longtime Julian employee

and family friend) came the script of one very special speech entitled "From Beans and Wild Yams to

the Wonder Drugs." In the speech which was delivered to an Oak Park church group in 1959, Julian

described his entire scientific career in colorful layman's language. Fascinating, moving, and funny, the

44

speech would eventually become the backbone of the film with Tony Award-winner Ruben Santiago-

Hudson delivering excerpts from the speech as Julian's story unfolds.

A Collaborative Effort

In the end, Percy Julian's television biography got made because NOVA had the faith and courage to

forge ahead in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and because we got an extraordinary

amount of help along the way.

The film is truly a collaborative effort, made possible by the support of organizations that also

wished to see Julian's remarkable story brought to a wide audience, and by scores of individuals who

contributed to it in ways large and small. We thank them all. "Forgotten Genius" is their film, too.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/julian/spea-nf.html

Julian Speaks …

… on the wonders of plants as natural laboratories:

I don't think that you can possibly embrace the kind of joy which one who has worked with plants

and plant structures such as I have over a period of nearly 40 years, how wonderful the plant laboratory

seems. There is never any end to the story.

I remember as a boy of 17 years of age, this was a fascinating thing for me. How we human beings

breathe out carbon dioxide into the air; the leaves of plants pick this carbon dioxide up; and the plant

gives off oxygen which we can breathe in and keep our life going.

This is given to you as a beginning student very simply. And yet in the course of that transformation

a very vicious poison occurs. The carbon dioxide goes into carbonic acid; the carbonic acid into formic

acid; the formic acid into formaldehyde. And we wonder how a plant can stand formaldehyde because

that's the thing that you Zoology students pickle your fish in and pickle your other animals. It's a pretty

deadening poison.

But it is interesting to see that the plant structure takes care of all of that. Immediately it uses up this

formaldehyde with a means to transform it into wonderful structures. All sorts of plant alkaloids, as we

call them, some of them being our choicest medicines and drugs. And so these fascinating laboratories

of the plant really make the psalmist's words true: "Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither

do they spin. And yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

… on the language of chemists as gobbledygook:

I don't want to frighten those of you who are not familiar with organic chemistry. I should have said

in the beginning that one hardly expects an organic chemist to be able to speak without his

gobbledygook in his language. As a matter of fact, one hardly expects a scientist to speak without that,

and therefore scientists are usually and traditionally poor speakers, I warn you.

The late Sir J. B. S. Haldane, the great biologist, put it rather aptly when he said that our language

doesn't lend itself to poetry. "Ladybird, ladybird fly away home" becomes impossible when you must

45

call the ladybird Coccinella bipunctata. And "A primrose by the river's brim, a yellow primrose was to

him" loses all of the flavor of Wordsworth when the primrose becomes a specimen of Primula vulgaris.

My little daughter Faith who she's no longer little now. I see her sitting in the audience here. When

she was 6 years old -- my daughter's a student here at Indiana University, I'm proud to say -- and some

people were making a bit of fuss over her daddy, about his new synthesis of cortisone, and they were

giving me at that time I believe making me "Chicagoan of the Year" or some such something. And

Faith had heard the word cortisone so much, she says "Daddy, what is cortisone?" So I said, "Well,

Faith, strictly speaking it is 4-pregnane, 3-11-20 trione, 17-21-dio, 21 acetane." "Dear heavens, Daddy!

What is it not strictly speaking?"

… on marriage and landing a big job:

I got a call from the vice president of the Glidden Company asking me if I wouldn't come to meet

him in Chicago for an interview. That they had were thinking of offering me a position with the Glidden

Company in research.

Well, I was teaching at DePauw then, earning the magnificent salary in the midst of the Depression

of $150 a month. And I wanted to get married to my dear wife who's here. She was earning much more

than that already.

You see, that's a terrible way to start out. I'm married to a dear little girl who holds a bachelor's

degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania

and a PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania. That's pretty bad on an old man, you know. And

she happens, by historical coincidence, to be the first woman whom Pennsylvania ever gave the Phi Beta

Kappa key to.

So I wanted to marry this girl. But I was too poor to do so and so I had to do something. So I

immediately wired her and told her to impress her with my importance that I was being offered a job at

the Glidden Company paying me $500 a month and I was considering it. I'm told that her father said in

his rather gruff way: "What-the-hell is he considering?" Dr. Johnson, her father, was a pretty outspoken

man.

Now, the story in back of that I can't help but just tell you quickly. The story in back of it, it wasn't a

miracle after all. I had sent many of my students from DePauw to the Institute of Paper Chemistry at

Appleton for their doctorate degrees and I'd become quite well acquainted with the Institute which

trained specialists in paper chemistry. And the Institute had decided to take pity on a young fellow who

really should have opportunity to earn a little bit more money so he could get married and start life, to

offer me a job in research.

But while the board of the Institute was meeting they had to meet because they had been informed of

an old statute on the books of Appleton, Wisconsin which said that no Negro should be bedded or

boarded in the city of Appleton overnight. This was back in the early 1930s. And so the board met in

emergency session to know what they could do with this man to whom they had offered a job.

Now, the vice-president of the Glidden Company was on that board. And he said to himself so he

said to me later: "Well, if he's half as good as they say he is, we might be able to use him at Glidden."

So he slipped out of the meeting and called me and I said to him rather haughtily: "Why, sir, I would

like to consider your job. But I have already accepted a job."

46

Oh yes, you know, we young people can get very important when we're young, you know. And so I

told him I would like to consider it. He said: "Well, I think you better come up right away." I told my

father about the thing. My father was quite a wise man. He said: "You know, something tells me you

ought to go." And so I got a job.

… on bold endeavors with the soybean:

Now, I landed at the Glidden Company. And when I got there, I found out that they wanted to make

me Director of Research. Which was a surprise. And so I started in on another very fascinating plant --

the soybean.

We got busy with this soybean. We dared to do something rather bold. We thought we would

isolate this protein, pure. And I built a plant for isolating this protein from the soybean, the first venture

that had been attempted in History to prepare a pure vegetable protein by isolating it from a plant. 50

percent of the weight of the soybean is protein. And what a protein! No other protein that we've known

comes so nearly to the basic protein of animals and humans as soybean protein.

And we did isolate this protein from the soybeans. The first plant was … We produced 5 tons a

day. Some few years later that was increased to 10 tons. And then by the time I left the Glidden

Company to 15 tons a day. I called yesterday to find out actually how much was being produced daily

now in this plant and they're producing 50 tons of pure soy protein a day now from this plant. Most of it

goes into the coating and sizing of magazine and book paper -- one of the greatest inventions, I think,

that has been put on the market for a long time.

Having had to serve as director of research for the Durkee Famous Foods division of the Glidden

Company, I got interested in margarine and liquid shortenings and then with this protein here to feed the

animals of the Nation. And this is the reason why it is grown. So that our animals are better fed than we

are with protein, richly fed with protein. And so we got to putting it into dog foods instead of the meat

which they couldn't get for dog foods.

In fact, I tasted Red Hot Dog Food so often that I could well understand how one lady went down to

the store the other day and said: "I'd like some of that corned beef hash that my husband brought home

one night. It's just fine." And she handed the man the can. The label was off of it. But he turned around

and looked on the other side of the can. He knew it was dog food and he didn't want to tell the woman

so. So he said: "My dear lady, we are completely out of that, the demand has been so great."

Well, I could tell that they might like it because we made a pretty good dog food. Red Hot was our

specialty at that company.

… on a "miracle" accident:

Sometimes miracles happen. One day the phone rang. I was troubleshooter in the plant, considered

so by the fellows out there. They all came to the boss to see what miracles he could do whenever

anything bad happened.

And the fellow said: "Doctor, something has happened. Some water leaked into this 100 tank

number one, 100,000-gallon tank of soybean oil." That was worth at that time $160,000. And he said:

"Some water's leaked into it and the tank of oil is spoiled." I said, "Spoiled? What do you mean?"

47

I saw myself being called up on the president's carpet for $160,000 worth of oil going just like that.

He says: "Why, some water's leaked into it and it's full of white solids. It's just full of white solids

floating around in it and settling down on the bottom." I saidL "What?" And I was over there in a jiffy.

And it was this little accidental discovery -- which kind of accidents characterize the development of

Science so often -- led to a practical way for the isolation of the steroids and the sterols from the soybean

oil.

We centrifuged that oil and got out these white solids of soy sterols and we sold them promptly for

$200-a-pound. We got more money out of the soybean sterols than we would have gotten out of the

whole tank of oil. Why? Because the beginning of Fernholz in Goettingen and Windaus and Butenandt

in Goettingen had shown that the sex hormones could be made from these soybean sterols.

We were soon able, ourselves, to put on the market the female and the male hormones --

progesterone and testosterone.

… on turning down an offer from President Truman:

When the National Science Foundation was first established, President Truman made me a director.

I happened to be appointed one of the first directors. All I can do now is frame it because I never acted

as a director. Because I was called to Cleveland to headquarters one day and was told I was fired. And I

said, "How come?" And he said, "Well, I thought of you just as a son of mine. But no man will accept

an appointment from Truman and stay on my staff."

Now, the strange thing about this was that I had not accepted the appointment yet. I had not

accepted the appointment. I had written to President Truman and said that I was highly honored by the

appointment, that I would be very happy to ... I was writing to my headquarters to find out whether or

not it would be agreeable to my firm that I accept it.

I was a good little boy. But before this happened, the Cleveland Plain Dealer had published the

appointments of Truman. The President naturally considered that poor little Percy Julian would

certainly accept his appointment and moreover, I wasn't, you know, deluged with pride. Because I knew

that the President ... This was quite political with the President. He wanted to have one Negro on the

science board. And if he could find one, he was going to have one on there.

So I knew that I was just an instrument in destiny. And so I went to the interview with the president

of the Glidden Company and asked him why. And he told me. And I said, "You are you referring to the

appointment to the National Science Foundation?" "Yes." And I said, "Well, you should have a letter in

your morning mail asking you if it were alright for me to accept the appointment." He came over and

put his arms around me. He said, "I knew you wouldn't do that to me. I knew you wouldn't do that to

me."

And then, you know, after somebody is nice to you and you've been nice, then you get mad, you

know? And so I said, "But I don't like this, Mr. Joyce. This smacks of slavery. My ancestors were

slaves and I hate slavery." "Well," he said, "now you just tell the President that for the time-being you

are in the midst of such work that you can't accept the appointment."

I wrote to President Truman, "Dear Mr. President," and etcetera with how honored I was and so on.

"The president of the Glidden Company informs me that I cannot accept your gracious appointment."

This didn't please him so well. But at least I stayed on the job.

48

… on the advent of birth control pills:

It is stated that by the year 2800, men and women upon the face of the Earth will be struggling for

space if the present rate of population continues. The population explosion is not a myth; it is a very

serious thing. And now we have the means -- the first means -- with which safely to control this

situation with intelligence.

What shall we do about it is one of the great questions facing the human race at this time. Moral and

ethical principles must be conserved. The family tradition, it seems, must not be broken. And yet all of

this will be possible, I believe, with care taken as it should be taken, in the prosecution of this fine

development of Science.

(listen to audio => http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/julian-speaks.html )

if on the Internet, Press <BACK> on your browser to return to

the previous page (or go to www.stealthskater.com)

else if accessing these files from the CD in a MS-Word session, simply <CLOSE> this

file's window-session; the previous window-session should still remain 'active'