Postage Stamp – First Day of Issue, 1993
This week in honor of Black History Month, we are celebrating research chemist Percy Lavon Julian. Part of the Black Heritage series, the US Postal Service issued this stamp to honor his pioneering work synthesizing medical compounds from plants. He developed cortisone for arthritis, a drug to treat glaucoma, and created progesterone, all of which earned him induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.
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Can you imagine what it was like for the grandson of enslaved people to overcome entrenched racial barriers and become a world-class chemical researcher?
Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama in an era when African Americans confronted prejudice and racism on a daily basis. His high school education left him ill-prepared to continue his education, but against all odds he was accepted to DePauw University in Indiana where he not only caught up to the level of his peers but also excelled in his studies. Julian majored in chemistry and graduated in 1920 as valedictorian of his class. After teaching for two years, Julian won a fellowship to Harvard University and completed a master’s degree in organic chemistry. From there he attended the University of Vienna, Austria and obtained his doctorate on the chemical synthesis of medicinal plants.
In the early 1930s, researchers worldwide were looking for innovative and inexpensive ways to produce steroids. With his knowledge of how to synthesize medical compounds from plants, Julian turned his attention to this problem. He developed a groundbreaking industrial process for converting large amounts of steroids from abundant plant sources, making them more affordable to mass produce. In 1948 when scientists discovered cortisone (used to treat rheumatoid arthritis), Julian applied his pioneering industrial process to the production of cortisone, developing a new synthesis to make it inexpensively and in bulk. Julian’s achievements in the chemical synthesis of commercially important natural products were important because they made these medical compounds and treatments affordable and readily available to the public.
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