"First you want to remember that people have a tendency always to have one person who is the ‘father of ’ - the Father of Penicillin, the Father of the Pill, the Father of the country, the Father of this and that. You really won’t create anything by being only the Father. Clearly to create anything, any ‘living’ thing, you need a Mother, you need a Father and you need a Midwife. And that metaphor, if you wish, is an accurate description, it’s completely relevant to this Pill, because the chemist in my book- not Carl Djerassi, the chemist – the chemist is invariably the Mother of a medical invention drug, an invention that is relevant to medicine. Invariably, because nothing can be done until the chemical entity is created. In other words, consider it ‘the egg ‘. And the biologist in my opinion is invariably the Father, with the initial biological experiments being the sperm that float around until one fertilizes the egg….And the clinician of course is then the Midwife…The chemist is always the Mother of the invention, and it could be a male mother. The biologist is always the father and it could be a female father ".

2.           And of course this truly reflected the nature of the great chemist Carl Djerassi who successfully developed the first contraceptive pill in the early fifties , a discovery documented and IPR protected through a patent having the number US 2,744,122 and which has been entered in the national inventors’ Hall of Fame , USA.

3.          Born in Vienna, Austria, Djerassi graduated from Kenyon College with an A.B. degree (organic chemistry) in 1942 and received his PhD from the University of Wisconcin in 1945. He was a research chemist from 1942 to 1952, a professor at Wayne University till 1959 and then onwards in a similar capacity at Stanford University. It was while working for a small company Syntex S.A. Mexico City, Mexico, a corporation of Mexico, that he discovered the first synthesis of the steroid oral contraceptive. In his own words,

          " We set out as chemists because we were working in the field of steroid chemistry and Syntex, the small company where I worked, was the world’s largest producer of progesterone.It produced progesterone by complex chemical steps from a Mexican plant of the Dioscorea genus, which does not contain progesterone it contains another steroid called diosgenin but through chemical transformations it can be converted into progesterone. We as chemists set out to see whether we could convert the steroid diosgenin into other steroids, which do not exist in nature, but which retain the biological activities of progesterone and are also orally active.In other words, our motivation was was to develop an orally effective replacement for the then existing uses of progesterone….And we succeeded in accomplishing that.On October 15, 1951 we finished the synthesis of a chemical compound that has a long chemical name, (17a-etinyl-19-nortestosterone) but a simpler generic name: norethindrone or in Europe norethsterone.And that is the substance that to this day is one of the active ingredients of the oral contraceptive that is taken by millions of women.

          " The other oral contraceptives which have been developed since that time have very minor modifications, and these modifications have been prompted primarily by the desire to circumvent the patent that Syntex had at that time and to establish their own patent position….From a biological- scientific standpoint there are six active ingredients even when there are hundreds of different pills all based on formulation of these six ingredients. A chemist would see that they are extremely close to what we first developed just as the various penicillins now are chemically close to the original penicillin that Fleming had discovered ".

4.           No surprise that Carl Djerassi became so famous as the discoverer of the oral contraceptive ; and his Syntex Pharmaceuticals grew over the years into a large corporation , now holding over 900 patents , the latest on the USPTO being the one having the number US 6,224,911 on "Process for the preparation of enteric coated pharmaceutical dosage forms" .

Acknowledgements.

www.uspto.gov, www.shebangmagazine.com, www.invent.org and related sites on the celebrated scientist.