Percy Julian 1899 – 1975

Percy Lavon Julian was born in Alabama as the eldest of six children. His father, James Sumner Julian, was a slave and he grew up during the time of heightened racism in the US. Among his childhood memories was finding a man lynched while walking in some woods near his home.

Julian's parents steered all their children towards education and he eventually studied at DePauw University in Indiana, which accepted African American students. He earned an Austin Fellowship in Chemistry and went to Harvard University in 1923, but the institution worried that white students would dislike being taught by a black person, so withdrew his teaching assistantship meaning he could not complete his PhD.

He later received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and was able to obtain his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1931.

Julian became a research chemist and pioneered the chemical synthesis of medical drugs from plants, becoming the first to create the large-scale synthesis of hormones such as testosterone, steroids and progesterone.

He went on to start his own company, where he worked to reduce the cost of producing steroids, meaning more people could access them for medical problems. Julian was only the second African American to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and was one of the first to receive a doctorate in chemistry.