American chemist Russell Marker worked to produce the steroid cortisone, but his research would prove crucial to the development of the contraceptive pill. He developed a process to obtain pure synthetic progesterone, the same one produced by the female body. Once the side group was removed, many other compounds could be synthesized. This process, the removal of the sapogenin side group, is still used today for the production of synthetic hormones and is known as “Marker degradation.” Marker’s research was conducted on hundreds of plants, primarily in Mexico. It was in Mexico in 1944 that he founded Syntex, a pharmaceutical company that would become one of the world’s leading producers of steroids. A Syntex employee, Carl Djerassi, who joined in 1949, patented Noretindone in 1951, eight times more potent than progesterone as an oral contraceptive. Both progesterone and noretindone were initially intended to be administered to women with a history of previous miscarriages. Then, in the early 1950s, two women, Katherine McCormick and Margaret Sanger, committed to changing the role of noretindone, making it a widely used contraceptive drug for women, as a means of emancipating women. The challenge was finding a state in the United States willing to conduct the trial. Finding none, they turned to Puerto Rico, which at the time was far ahead of the United States in birth control (it had already legalized birth control in 1937, for example). Unintended pregnancies among those taking the drug dropped to 1%, compared to 40% with other forms of contraception. In 1957, the drug Enovid was accepted by the FDA for the treatment of menstrual irregularities. Then in 1960, as a contraceptive. And by 1965, nearly 4 million American women were taking “the pill,” and by 1985, the number had risen to a staggering 80 million women, using Marker’s discovery in Mexico.
