For the last 50 years Carl Djerassi has been known as the father of
the birth control pill, which has its half century anniversary this year. Djerassi
was the first man to synthesize the oral contraceptive. So it was
with some interest that I read the Time cover story on the pill. As I
read it, I became curiouser and curiouser. Nowhere in the piece was
there any mention of Djerassi.
I went to interview Djerassi a few years ago and have kept in touch so
I contacted him and asked him if he had seen the article. Not being a
Time reader, he hadn't.
He eventually wrote an excellent letter to the magazine, published
below, which the magazine decided not to print. It makes you wonder. If there could be such a glaring inaccuracy in this cover story, which they refused to acknowledged, you can't help but wonder ...
May 2, 2010 Vienna
Your feature article "The Pill at 50" contains two extraordinary
omissions -- namely who first proposed an oral contraceptive for women
and what "the Pill" actually constitutes.The article states "The idea of a hormonal approach to birth control
had been around for years" without stating that it was Ludwig
Haberlandt of the University of Innsbruck who in the 1920's with
support of the Rockefeller Foundation first demonstrated
experimentally and published that the natural female hormone,
progesterone, then solely available from glandular extracts, was
nature's contraceptive (by preventing further ovulation during
pregnancy) and that it should be used as a contraceptive, specifically
in pill form. The opposition to his ideas was so pronounced that he
committed suicide in 1932. Yet even if he had lived and pursued his
work with pure progesterone, he would have found that it would not
have worked since progesterone is not orally effective and would
require daily injections. Pincus and Rock, the two Americans defined
as the fathers of the Pill in your article never cited his work, which
is no reason for Time to perpetuate that injustice.Your article continues: "He [Pincus] learned... that injections of
progesterone, which chemists in Mexico had been able to synthesize
from wild yams, could block ovulation...so in 1956 Rock and Pincus conducted clinical trials in Puerto Rico,
where many women were desperate for some better means of birth
control. The Pill proved effective at blocking ovulation and was
approved for the treatment of "female disorders" in 1957."But what Pill is your article talking about? Progesterone? If so, this
is pure nonsense. What it does not state is that chemists at a small
Mexican pharmaceutical company, Syntex, S.A., first synthesized an
orally active progestational steroid, named norethindrone, which does
not exist in nature and that they supplied Pincus with this steroid
for further biological work. One and one-half years after the first
publication by the Syntex group, chemists at G.D. Searle -- a company for
which Pincus consulted, synthesized a close relative, norethynodrel,
which, as shown by Pincus -- is largely converted in the stomach into
norethindrone. Both Syntex's norethindrone and Searle's norethynodrel
were approved in 1957 by the FDA for the treatment of menstrual
disorders. Even today, norethindrone, though not norethynodrel, is
still used by millions of women as an oral contraceptive.None of Pincus's and Rock's work would have been possible without the
initial chemical breakthrough in Mexico on deliberately synthesizing
an orally effective progestin -- an achievement which was recognized by
the National Medal of Science in 1973 in the White House and in 1978
by inclusion of Syntex's norethindrone as the first ever drug in the
National Inventors Hall of Fame. The year 2011 will be the
international Year of Chemistry and Time's total disregard of the
fundamental and indispensable chemical contribution to the Pill is a
good example of the sort of journalistic chemophobia and chemical
illiteracy that merits correction.--Carl Djerassi
Professor of Chemistry emeritus,
Stanford University