Chemist, ‘father’ of birth-control pill

SAN FRANCISCO — Carl Djerassi, the chemist widely considered the father of the birth-control pill, has died.

Djerassi died of complications of cancer Friday in his San Francisco home, Stanford University spokesman Dan Stober said. He was 91.

Djerassi, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Stanford, was most famous for leading a research team in Mexico City that in 1951 developed norethindrone, a synthetic molecule that became a key component of the first birth-control pill.

“The pill,” as it came to be known, radically transformed sexual practices and women’s lives. The pill gave women more control over their fertility than they had ever had before and permanently put doctors — who previously didn’t see contraceptives as part of their job — in the birth-control picture.

In his book, This Man’s

Pill, Djerassi said the invention also changed his life, making him more interested in how science affects society.

In 1969, he submitted a public policy article about the global implications of U.S. contraceptive research, according to the Stanford News Service. In 1970, he published another article about the feasibility of a birth-control pill for men.

Later in life, Djerassi, a native of Austria who came to the U.S. in 1939 with his mother, wrote poems, short stories and plays.

“Carl Djerassi is probably the greatest chemist our department ever had,” Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford, said in an obituary released by the university. “I know of no person in the world who combined the mastery of science with literary talent as Carl Djerassi.”