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| FERTILE MIND: Djerassi used his
inside knowledge of high-powered research to create a hybrid literary
genre, science-in-fiction. |
Everybody’s a critic. Or so it seems tonight, after the first staged reading of Carl Djerassi’s first play in this bare San Francisco theater. The chemist turned entrepreneur turned playwright sits with the director and actors on a chilly, makeshift stage, the lights glaring in his eyes. It might as well be an interrogation cell.
The people in the audience have been asked to react to the play. They’re not holding back. Many don’t like the play’s main character, a scientist named Melanie Laidlaw who devises a way to impregnate herself by injecting her own egg with a single sperm. One woman calls Melanie "a cold fish." Others pick on scientific dialogue that has nothing to do with the characters’ desires. The play has plenty to say about intracytoplasmic sperm injection -- but what about emotional truth? "I didn’t believe the argument that [taking a man’s sperm] wasn’t theft," says one man.
Dapper, silver-haired and dignified, the 5-foot-7 Djerassi absorbs the audience’s critique of Menachem’s Seed. But the man best known as "the father of the Pill" stands his ground. "I hear what you’re saying," he tells them. "But this is my play."
You might think that at age 75 -- after synthesizing a contraceptive used worldwide by 80 million women, after winning every scientific honor in his field shy of a Nobel, after making a fortune in industry, after switching careers and writing five well-regarded novels -- you might think Djerassi doesn’t need this. The late hour. The cold theater. The verbal tomatoes.
But you’d be wrong. For throughout his life -- by circumstance, choice and perhaps unconscious design -- he has been an outsider, a self-described professional polygamist straddling disparate worlds, driven to strive for greatness in all of them.
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| FOR ART’S SAKE: "Tori Gate"
guards the artist colony at Djerassi's ranch above Woodside. The spread
doubles as an artist colony. |
The next day, Djerassi wakes up in his 15th floor apartment atop San Francisco’s Russian Hill, a large aerie with sweeping views of the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the jumble of downtown towers. The walls are hung with Klees and Calders. The ceiling is a mural painted with clouds, constellations -- and a molecular diagram of 17a-ethynyl-19-nortestosterone, better known as the Pill.
He’s dejected about the rough post-play critique. It’s early spring, just two weeks before another, more polished reading at a much larger venue. But after talking it over with his wife, fellow Stanford professor and best-selling biographer Diane Middlebrook, he sits down and, over the next few days, bangs out his 13th revision.
Djerassi has rewritten the plot of his own life time and again since arriving in the United States in 1939. A Jewish teen with a German-Viennese accent and a permanently damaged left knee, he traveled in steerage, landing in New York City with no money and no high school diploma. "You want to validate yourself twice or maybe three times over," Djerassi says. "You want to prove yourself in your new home where you’re invariably considered an outsider."
Before turning 20, he found work as a junior chemist in the pharmaceutical industry and got his name on the patent of one of the first antihistamines. By 23, he had his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, focusing on the synthesis and transformation of steroids, including sex hormones.
To make his name, he strategically renewed his outsider status, departing for the scientific outback of late 1940s Mexico City to lead research at a tiny firm named Syntex. By October 1951, a group led by the 28-year-old Djerassi had synthesized norethindrone, "a super-potent orally active progestational agent." It turned out to be the key ingredient in the Pill.
It took a decade for Djerassi’s chemistry to reach the marketplace as an oral contraceptive. Its social impact would be more like the atomic bomb than a mere pharmaceutical, its fallout helping foment the sexual and feminist revolutions.
Meanwhile, Djerassi grabbed one of academia’s lower rungs at Detroit’s Wayne State. He made the move pay off, winning the first of many major kudos, the American Chemical Society’s Award in Pure Chemistry in 1958, for new methods in establishing the structure of steroid molecules.
Recruited to Stanford in 1959, Djerassi displayed a genius not only for chemistry -- he helped establish the use of mass spectrometry in organic chemistry -- but for sheer productivity. He has authored more than 1,200 articles, many of them co-written with some 300 graduate students and postdoctoral colleagues from 52 countries. Between 1961 and 1976, he was cited in more academic journals than any other organic chemist in the world.
At the same time, the professor maintained a second career in industrial chemistry. He convinced Syntex to relocate from Mexico to Stanford Research Park. The company boomed, eventually spinning off Syva, which developed sophisticated drug screening, and Zoecon, which pioneered biological pest control. In addition to teaching and leading Stanford research, Djerassi was a top executive of all three companies. He reveled in what he called his professional bigamy.
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| SKY’S THE LIMIT: The ceiling in
Djerassi's San Francisco flat is painted with a mural depicting the
chemical formula for the Pill. |
Bigamy had its rewards. The soaring Syntex stock -- an original $2 share reached a value of $8,000 by 1993 -- afforded Djerassi a lifestyle as distinctive as his schedule was hectic. He accumulated 1,200 acres of redwoods, meadows and canyons in the Santa Cruz mountains near Woodside. He christened the spread SMIP Ranch -- for Syntex Made It Possible.
The biotech bull market also allowed Djerassi to amass an art collection including Picasso, Degas, Moore and especially Paul Klee. Eventually, he built one of the world’s largest private holdings of Klee, works now rotating between his home and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
If his chemistry revolutionized family planning, being "father of the Pill" also shaped Djerassi, drawing him into the politics and sociology of sex. In fact, he has been frustrated that America’s skittishness about sexual matters, combined with a litigious culture, have stymied advances in contraception. Since the late 1960s, he’s regularly lectured and written on the subject. For years he taught a popular undergraduate course, "biosocial aspects of birth control." In a 1994 journal article, he went so far as to argue that, since improvements in fertilization are outstripping those in contraception, men should store a stock of sperm early in life and then be vasectomized. "In the middle of the next century . . . sex will be purely for fun -- perhaps the greatest hedonistic and pleasurable thing humans can indulge in," he says. "Reproduction will be done under a microscope."
Energetic and demanding, Djerassi cultivates a sophisticated reserve (even doctoral students are not invited to call him Carl) and has a weakness for elegant ascots and silk shirts. But when it comes to sexual matters, the professor displays a playful, pointed candor. Over dinner in San Francisco, he holds forth on theatrical masturbation scenes, Viagra’s potential for women and methods for measuring erection rigidity. In his autobiography, he reveals that he fathered his daughter Pamela while still married to his first wife, leading to divorce and second marriage, which then produced his son, Dale, ’75.
Djerassi could have become another aging lion, leading a lab and continuing to collect kudos like the National Medal of Science (which he received in 1973 for synthesizing the first oral contraceptive) or the National Medal of Technology (1991, for Zoecon’s eco-sensitive insect control) or the Priestley Medal (1992, for contributions to chemistry and society, the American Chemical Society’s highest honor).
But two profound personal trials rerouted his trajectory.
In 1978, Djerassi’s daughter Pamela, a 28-year-old artist, committed suicide. Devastated, he consoled himself by establishing a resident artist program at SMIP ranch to honor her memory. The artist colony was funded partly by extensive sales from his art collection and supported by major donations of land and buildings. Over the years, nearly a thousand artists, from sculptors to poets, have spent monthlong fellowships there.
Romantic heartbreak led Djerassi to take up the literary arts himself. He’s quick to cite May 8, 1983, as the beginning of his life as a writer -- the date that Middlebrook left him for another man. "I, who had never composed a poem or written a word of fiction, decided to revenge myself on that polished poet and literature professor on her own turf."
By the time he and Middlebrook were reunited a year later (their marriage, in 1985, was his third), Djerassi’s literary revenge had resulted in a stack of poems and a 331-page roman