A Hispanic Chemistry Student Helped Create

One of the Most Important Pills in History

The birth of the birth control pill involved a jungle -- and then was helped into being by a chemistry student in a city.

Some birth control pills contain only progesterone, while others combine it with another hormone, estrogen. Originally, progesterone was created from an extract of a jungle plant. But such extractions of progesterone were not commercially practical, so a chemical synthesis would be necessary.

That happened on October 15, in 1951. Luis E. Miramontes, a 26-year-old Mexican chemistry student, was working in a lab in Mexico City, at a Mexican chemical company called Syntex. On that day, Miramontes performed the last step of his team’s process to synthesize a substance called norethindrone, which is a form of progesterone.

Using a female hormone in a pill form helps prevent the release of an egg from an ovary, thus preventing pregnancy – something that had been known since experiments on rabbits in the 1930s.

Miramontes’ team included two other colleagues, Carl Djerassi and George Rosenkranz. Djerassi was a researcher, and Rosenkranz was head of the lab. Lab work is often a collaborative process, but Miramontes’ role in synthesizing the last step of the new compound was later confirmed by Djerassi.

“Lecture audiences are always intrigued when I display a slide showing (Miramontes’) carefully dated and hand-written lab protocol of the very last step in that synthesis,” Djerassi has said.

How important was Miramontes’ role as a co-inventor of the bill control pill? In 1964, when the U.S. Department of Patents created a list of the 40 most important inventions between 1794 and the date of the list, the contraceptive pill was one of them. The name of Luis Miramontes joined a list that included Pasteur, Edison, the Wright Brothers, and others.

Miramontes went on to receive the Mexican National Prize in Chemistry, and the Mexican Academy of Sciences declared that, as of 2005, the invention of norethindrone – chosen on other occasions as one of the most important molecules ever created by mankind – was the most important Mexican contribution to world science.