Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was an American research chemist who made important contributions to the development of medicines from plants. He was the first person to create the natural substance physostigmine. Julian also helped develop large-scale methods to produce the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols, such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work helped establish the production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and artificial hormones used in birth control pills.

Julian started his own company to create steroid intermediates from wild Mexican yams. His methods reduced the cost of these chemicals for large pharmaceutical companies, making important drugs like synthetic cortisone more widely available. Julian was one of the first African Americans to earn a doctorate in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and the second African-American scientist, after David Blackwell, to be inducted into the organization from any field. Throughout his career, Julian received more than 130 patents.

Early life and family

Percy Lavon Julian was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, as the first of six children born to James Sumner Julian and Elizabeth Lena Adams Julian. Both of his parents graduated from Alabama State University, which was established later. His father worked as a clerk for the United States Post Office's Railway Service, and his mother was a schoolteacher.

Education and academic career

At a time when most African Americans could not attend school beyond the eighth grade, Julian’s parents encouraged all of their children to pursue higher education. Julian went to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. The college had very few African-American students. The town was separated by race, and Julian faced difficult social situations. He was not allowed to live in the college dormitory and first stayed in a boarding home off campus, which refused to serve him meals. It took him several days to find a place where he could eat. Later, he worked jobs like firing a furnace, waiting tables, and doing other tasks in a fraternity house. In return, he was allowed to sleep in the attic and eat at the house. Julian graduated from DePauw in 1920 as a Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian.

By 1930, Julian’s father moved the family to Greencastle so that all of his children could attend DePauw. He still worked as a railroad postal clerk. James owned a home that was worth $3,000 in 1930 and about $58,000 in 2025. After graduating from DePauw, Julian wanted to earn a doctorate in chemistry but learned it would be difficult for an African American to do so. Instead, he became a chemistry instructor at Fisk University. In 1923, he received an Austin Fellowship in Chemistry, which allowed him to study at Harvard University for his master’s degree. However, Harvard took away Julian’s teaching assistantship because they worried white students would not want to be taught by an African American, making it impossible for him to complete his Ph.D. there.

In 1929, while teaching at Howard University, Julian received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to continue his studies at the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1931. He studied under Ernst Späth and was considered an excellent student. In Europe, Julian experienced freedom from the racial prejudice he faced in the United States. He joined intellectual gatherings, attended the opera, and was accepted by his peers. Julian was one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, following St. Elmo Brady and Edward M.A. Chandler.

After returning from Vienna, Julian taught for one year at Howard University. At Howard, partly because of his role as a department head, Julian became involved in university politics, which led to a series of scandals. At the request of the university president, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Julian encouraged a white professor, Jacob Shohan, to resign. Later, Shohan released letters Julian had written to him from Vienna to a local African-American newspaper. The letters discussed topics like wine, music, chemical experiments, and plans for a new chemistry building. In the letters, Julian spoke casually and sometimes disrespectfully about some Howard faculty members, calling one a “donkey.”

Around the same time, Julian had a conflict with his laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson. Julian had recommended Thompson for dismissal in March 1932. Thompson sued Julian for “alienating the affections of his wife,” claiming he had seen them together in a romantic situation. Julian sued Thompson for libel. When Thompson was fired, he also released personal letters Julian had written to him from Vienna. These letters revealed how Julian had convinced the Howard president to accept his plans for the chemistry building and how he had persuaded a friend to appoint a professor he favored. Throughout the summer of 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American published all of Julian’s letters. The scandal and pressure forced Julian to resign. At a low point in his career, his former mentor, William Martin Blanchard, a chemistry professor at DePauw, offered Julian a job teaching organic chemistry at DePauw in 1932. Julian then helped a fellow student from the University of Vienna, Josef Pikl, come to the United States to work with him at DePauw. In 1935, Julian and Pikl completed the total synthesis of physostigmine and confirmed its correct chemical structure. Robert Robinson of Oxford University had first published a synthesis of physostigmine, but Julian found that Robinson’s reported melting point was incorrect, showing he had not created the compound. When Julian completed his synthesis, the melting point matched the correct one for natural physostigmine from the calabar bean. Julian also extracted stigmasterol, named after Physostigma venenosum, the West African calabar bean he hoped could be used to make human steroidal hormones. Around 1934, Butenandt and Fernholz in Germany showed that stigmasterol from soybean oil could be converted to progesterone through synthetic chemistry.

Private sector work: Glidden

In 1956, Julian was not given a professorship at DePauw University because of his race. DuPont offered a job to Pikl but refused to hire Julian, even though he had excellent skills as an organic chemist. They apologized, saying they did not know he was Black. Julian then applied for a job at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin. However, Appleton was a sundown town, which meant it did not allow African Americans to stay overnight. The town’s rules said, "No Negro should be a bed or boarded overnight in Appleton."

At the same time, Julian wrote to the Glidden Company, a business that provided soybean oil products, asking for a five-gallon sample of the oil to use as a starting point for creating human steroidal sex hormones. His wife was having trouble having children, so he needed the oil for this work. After receiving Julian’s request, W. J. O'Brien, a vice-president at Glidden, called Julian and offered him a job as director of research at Glidden’s Soya Products Division in Chicago. Julian was likely chosen for the job because he could speak German, and Glidden had recently bought a modern plant from Germany to extract vegetable oil from soybeans for paints and other uses.

Julian oversaw the setup of the plant at Glidden when he arrived in 1936. He then designed and built the first plant in the world to produce industrial-grade, isolated soy protein from oil-free soybean meal. Isolated soy protein could replace expensive milk casein in industrial uses, such as coating and sizing paper, making glue for Douglas fir plywood, and creating water-based paints. At the start of World War II, Glidden sent a sample of Julian’s soy protein to National Foam System Inc. (now part of Kidde Fire Fighting), which used it to develop Aer-O-Foam, a firefighting foam used by the U.S. Navy. Although Julian did not create the foam himself, his careful preparation of the soy protein made it possible. When the protein was mixed with water and passed through an aerating nozzle, it formed a foam that could smother oil and gasoline fires on ships, especially on aircraft carriers. This foam saved the lives of thousands of sailors and airmen. Because of this achievement, the NAACP awarded Julian the Spingarn Medal in 1947, its highest honor. The 1943 U.S. Office of War Information film Food for Fighters featured Julian as the soy expert when explaining how soy could improve the nutrition of K-rations.

Julian’s research at Glidden changed in 1940 when he began working on making progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone from plant sterols like stigmasterol and sitosterol, which he isolated from soybean oil using a method he invented and patented. At the time, doctors were discovering many uses for these hormones, but only tiny amounts could be extracted from animal spinal cords. In 1940, Julian was able to produce 100 pounds (45 kg) of mixed soy sterols daily, which were worth $10,000 ($108,000 today) as sex hormones. He soon began ozonizing 100 pounds (45 kg) of mixed sterol dibromides daily. The soy stigmasterol was easily converted into large amounts of progesterone, and the first pound of progesterone he made, valued at $63,500 ($684,000 today), was sent to Upjohn in an armored car. Production of other sex hormones followed soon after.

Julian’s work made it possible to produce these hormones on a larger scale, which could lower the cost of treating hormonal problems. Julian and his team obtained patents for Glidden on key processes for making progesterone and testosterone from soybean sterols. Before this, patents held by a group of European pharmaceutical companies had kept prices for these hormones high in the 1940s. His discovery saved many lives. On April 13, 1949, Dr. Philip Hench at the Mayo Clinic announced that cortisone was very effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis. At the time, Merck produced cortisone at great expense using a complex 36-step process developed by chemist Lewis Sarett, starting with deoxycholic acid from cattle bile. On September 30, 1949, Julian announced an improved method for making cortisone that avoided using osmium tetroxide, a rare and expensive chemical. By 1950, Glidden could begin producing related compounds that might have some cortisone activity. Julian also announced the synthesis of cortexolone (also called Reichstein’s Substance S or 11-Deoxycortisol), a molecule that differed from cortisone by one missing oxygen atom. He also worked on 17α-hydroxyprogesterone and pregnenetriolone, which he hoped might help treat rheumatoid arthritis, but they were not effective.

On April 5, 1952, biochemist Durey Peterson and microbiologist Herbert Murray at Upjohn published the first report of a fermentation process that used common molds to produce 11α-hydroxyprogesterone or 11α-hydrocortisone from progesterone or Substance S, which could then be converted into cortisone or cortisol. After two years, Glidden stopped making cortisone and focused on Substance S. Julian developed a process to convert pregnenolone, which was available in large amounts from soybean sterols, into cortexolone. In 1952, Glidden, which had previously made progesterone and other steroids from soybean oil, stopped its own production and began importing these compounds from Mexico through a deal with Diosynth, a small Mexican company started in 1947 by Russell Marker after he left Syntex. Glidden’s cost to produce cortexolone was high, so Upjohn decided to use progesterone, which was available in large quantities at a low cost from Syntex, to make cortisone and hydrocortisone.

In 1953, Glidden decided to leave the steroid business, which had not been profitable despite Julian’s work. On December 1, 1953, Julian left Glidden after 18 years, giving up a salary of nearly $50,000 a year (about $600,000 in 2025) to start his own company, Julian Laboratories, Inc. He took over a small building in Franklin Park, Illinois, that belonged to Suburban Chemical Company. On December 2, 195

Oak Park and Julian Laboratories

In 1950, Julian moved his family to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, becoming the first African-American family to live there. Some people in the area welcomed them, but others opposed their move. Before they moved in, their home was attacked with fire on Thanksgiving Day, 1950. After they moved in, the house was damaged by dynamite on June 12, 1951. These attacks made the community more determined to help Julian’s family. Julian’s son later said that during this time, he and his father often stayed on the front porch with a shotgun to watch over their home.

Julian started a new research company called Julian Laboratories, Inc. He hired many skilled chemists, including African-Americans and women, who had previously worked at Glidden. Julian secured a contract to supply Upjohn with $2 million worth of progesterone, which would be worth $22 million today. To compete with Syntex, Julian had to use the same type of Mexican yam, which came from the barbasco trade in Mexico. He used his own money and borrowed from friends to build a processing plant in Mexico, but the government would not allow him to harvest the yams. Abraham Zlotnik, a former classmate from the University of Vienna who had escaped the Holocaust with Julian’s help, led a search for a new yam source in Guatemala.

In July 1956, Julian and leaders from two other American companies met with a U.S. Senate subcommittee. They explained that Syntex was unfairly controlling access to the Mexican yam. The hearings led to Syntex signing an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. Syntex did not admit to unfair practices but promised not to do so in the future. Within five years, large American pharmaceutical companies bought all six Mexican producers of steroid intermediates, four of which had been owned by Mexicans. Syntex reduced the cost of steroid intermediates more than 250 times over twelve years, from $80 per gram in 1943 to $0.31 per gram in 1955. Competition from Upjohn and General Mills, which improved progesterone production from stigmasterol, lowered the price of Mexican progesterone to less than $0.15 per gram in 1957. Prices continued to drop, reaching $0.08 per gram in 1968.

In 1958, Upjohn bought 6,900 kg of progesterone from Syntex at $0.135 per gram, 6,201 kg from Searle (which had acquired Pesa) at $0.143 per gram, 5,150 kg from Julian Laboratories at $0.14 per gram, and 1,925 kg from General Mills (which had acquired Protex) at $0.142 per gram. Even though prices for steroid intermediates dropped, a group of large American pharmaceutical companies kept the prices of corticosteroid drugs the same into the 1960s. Cortisone remained at $5.48 per gram since 1954, hydrocortisone at $7.99 per gram since 1954, and prednisone at $35.80 per gram since 1956. Merck and Roussel Uclaf focused on improving corticosteroid production from cattle bile acids. By 1960, Roussel produced nearly one-third of the world’s corticosteroids from bile acids. Chemists at Julian Laboratories found a way to increase the yield of a product they were barely breaking even on. They lowered the price per kg from $4,000 to $400. Julian sold his company in 1961 for $2.3 million, which was worth $25 million today, becoming one of the first Black millionaires. The U.S. and Mexican facilities were bought by Smith Kline, and Julian’s chemical plant in Guatemala was purchased by Upjohn.

In 1964, Julian founded Julian Associates and Julian Research Institute, which he managed for the rest of his life. He also helped start the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of Chicago. Julian died of liver cancer in Waukegan, Illinois, on April 19, 1975, one week after his 76th birthday.

Personal

On December 24, 1935, he married Anna Roselle, who earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937. They had two children: Percy Lavon Julian Jr. (August 31, 1940 – February 24, 2008), a well-known civil rights lawyer in Madison, Wisconsin; and Faith Roselle Julian (born 1944), who lives in their Oak Park home and gives encouraging talks about her father and his work in science.

Honors and legacy

• In 1947, the NAACP gave him the Spingarn Medal.
• In 1950, the Chicago Sun-Times named Percy Julian the Chicagoan of the Year.
• In 1973, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his scientific work. He became the second African American to join, after David Blackwell.
• Since 1975, the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers has honored scientists with the Percy L. Julian Award for research in science and engineering.
• In 1975, Percy L. Julian High School opened on Chicago’s south side as a public high school.
• In 1980, a science and math building at DePauw University was renamed the Percy L. Julian Mathematics and Science Center. A street in Greencastle, Indiana, where DePauw is located, was also named after him.
• In 1985, Hawthorne School in Oak Park, Illinois, was renamed Percy Julian Middle School.
• Illinois State University, where Julian served on the board of trustees, named a building after him.
• A building at Coppin State University is called the Percy Julian Science Building.
• In 1990, he was added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• In 1993, the United States Postal Service released a stamp featuring Julian’s image.
• In 1999, the American Chemical Society honored Julian’s work to create physostigmine as a National Historic Chemical Landmark.
• In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Percy Lavon Julian in his list of 100 Greatest African-Americans.
• In 2011, a group at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that helps students prepare for exams was named after Percy Julian.
• In 2014, Google created a Doodle to celebrate Julian’s life and work.
• In 2019, an asteroid discovered in 1990 was named 5622 Percy Julian in his honor. The name was officially recorded by the Minor Planet Center on August 27, 2019.
• In November 2022, Robert E Lee High School in Montgomery, Alabama, was renamed Dr. Percy L. Julian High School.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson played the role of Percy Julian in a PBS Nova documentary titled Forgotten Genius. The documentary aired on February 6, 2007, and was supported by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. About sixty of Julian’s family members, friends, and colleagues were interviewed for the film. The documentary was filmed in May 2002 at DePauw University’s campus in Greencastle, Indiana, where a bust of Julian is displayed in the atrium of the Percy Lavon Julian Science and Mathematics Center. The release of the documentary was delayed to allow time for the creation of a companion book about Julian’s life. James Anderson, a historian from the University of Illinois, said in the film, “His story is a story of great accomplishment, of heroic efforts and overcoming tremendous odds…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.”

The Percy Lavon Julian family papers are stored at DePauw University.

Patents

• U.S. patent 2,218,971 , October 22, 1940, Method for recovering sterols
• U.S. patent 2,373,686 , July 15, 1942, Phosphatide product and its production method
• U.S. patent 2,752,339 , June 26, 1956, Method for preparing cortisone
• U.S. patent 3,149,132 , September 15, 1964, 16-aminomenthyl-17-alkyltestosterone derivatives
• U.S. patent 3,274,178 , September 20, 1966, Method for preparing 16(alpha)-hydroxypregnenes and intermediates obtained therein
• U.S. patent 3,761,469 , September 25, 1973, Process for the manufacture of steroid chlorohydrins; with Arnold Lippert Hirsch

Publications

• Research on the Origin of Certain Plant Alkaloids and How They Form in Plant Structures; Percy L. Julian. Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, 1933, Volume 43, Pages 122–126.
• Studies in the Indole Series. I. Creating Alpha-Benzylindoles; Percy L. Julian, Josef Pikl. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1933, Volume 55, Issue 5, Pages 2105–2110.
• Studies in the Indole Series. V. Completing the Synthesis of Physostigmine (Eserine); Percy L. Julian, Josef Pikl. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1935, Volume 57, Issue 4, Pages 755–757.
• Studies in the Indole Series. VII. Observing the Fischer Reaction with Ketones Like R CH₂ CO CH₃. Alpha-Propyl and Alpha-Homoveratryl Indole; Percy L. Julian, Josef Pikl. Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, 1935, Volume 45, Pages 145–150.