Percy Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was born on 11 April 1899 in Montgomery, Alabama, the grandson of formerly enslaved people, and grew up in the segregated South, where local schools for Black students offered education only through the eighth grade. He attended DePauw University in Indiana, arriving academically underprepared relative to his white classmates due to his limited earlier schooling, but graduated as valedictorian in 1920 despite being barred from living in the university's dormitories because of his race.

Julian faced severe barriers pursuing graduate education, initially unable to secure a place in a doctoral chemistry programme due to racial discrimination despite his evident talent; he taught at Fisk University and West Virginia State College before eventually earning a fellowship to complete his PhD in chemistry at the University of Vienna in Austria in 1931, one of very few Black Americans to earn a doctorate in chemistry at that time.

Julian returned to DePauw as a research fellow, where in 1935 he achieved a major scientific breakthrough, successfully synthesising physostigmine, a compound used to treat glaucoma, from the Calabar bean, a synthesis that had eluded prominent chemists for decades and established Julian's significant reputation within the chemistry field, though DePauw declined to offer him a permanent faculty position, reportedly due to resistance from trustees uncomfortable appointing a Black professor.

Unable to secure appropriate academic positions despite his research achievements, Julian moved into industrial chemistry, joining the Glidden Company in 1936, where he developed cost-effective methods for synthesising steroids and hormones, including progesterone and cortisone, from soybean oil, dramatically reducing production costs for these compounds and making them far more widely available for medical use, including in treatments for arthritis and other inflammatory conditions previously limited by prohibitively expensive synthesis methods.

Julian's soybean-derived synthesis techniques for cortisone in particular represented a landmark achievement in pharmaceutical chemistry, transforming what had been an extraordinarily expensive, scarce treatment into an affordable, widely accessible medication, directly benefiting millions of patients with arthritis and other conditions requiring steroid treatment, a contribution with enormous ongoing public health impact extending far beyond the immediate scientific achievement.

In 1953 Julian founded his own company, Julian Laboratories, becoming one of relatively few Black-owned pharmaceutical chemical manufacturing businesses of the era, which he later sold for a substantial sum, becoming one of the wealthiest Black Americans of his generation through his scientific and business achievements combined. He held more than 130 patents over his career and received numerous scientific honours, including induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. Julian died in 1975, and is widely remembered as one of the most significant industrial chemists of the 20th century, whose research directly made modern steroid medicine accessible and affordable to millions of patients worldwide.