Percy Julian

Percy Lavon Julian was an African-American research chemist and entrepreneur whose extraordinary chemical syntheses democratized modern medicine. The grandson of enslaved people in Jim Crow Alabama, Julian was valedictorian at DePauw University and earned his master's at Harvard before systemic racism denied him teaching appointments. Undeterred, he traveled to the University of Vienna in Austria, earning his doctorate in 1931.

In 1935 at DePauw, Julian accomplished the world's first total chemical synthesis of physostigmine, an alkaloid extracted from the Calabar bean used to treat glaucoma. Appointed director of research at the Glidden Company in Chicago, Julian developed ingenious industrial techniques to synthesize steroid hormones—including progesterone, testosterone, and cortisone—from soybean sterols (stigmasterol). His breakthroughs slashed the cost of cortisone treatment for millions of rheumatoid arthritis patients from hundreds of dollars per gram to pennies. Julian obtained more than 130 chemical patents and was one of the first Black scientists inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.