Professional bigamist
I was always a professional bigamist if not a polygamist - I am certainly professionally a polygamist now. By bigamist I mean that I was working for a university and for industry simultaneously. Very few people at that time did - now more people do it - but at that time very few people did it. I was a professor at Stanford University. And the Syntex company had moved to the Stanford Industrial Park and I ran the research there for a while. And then I helped found and also ran Zoecon, another company dedicated to developing fundamentally new approaches to insect control.
DDT
The year we are talking about is 1968, which was the year in which DDT was banned. DDT is now a dirty word but you must remember that it probably saved more lives around that time than anything else. Probably more even than penicillin. Initially, people were grateful to DDT which was anointed even with a Nobel Prize. DDT is basically non-toxic to humans. It does have certain negative effects which we know perfectly well now, and it is unbelievably persistent. These were advantages at the time, until people learned what the disadvantages were.
Biorational approach
We became interested in the importance of what was called the 'biorational approach' to insect control. You try to find something that kills the insect but which does not kill you or animals or things around. Oral contraception at that time was considered to take the biorational approach, the biological rationale being progesterone, which is nature's contraception, and it simply involved trying to modify it chemically so that we could use it. Well, it turns out that in the 1960's there was work on insect hormones, which was about 30 years behind the work on mammalian hormones.
Juvenile hormone
That research showed that insects also had a variety of interesting hormones, one of which is the juvenile hormone. This hormone doesn't exist in other organisms. That is the hormone that maintains the insect in a juvenile state, which is the larval state, and then the insect turns off the production of that juvenile hormone in order to develop from the larval stage to the pupa stage and then to an adult insect that can reproduce. Well, the idea was that if you could synthesize the juvenile hormone and apply it, like a pesticide, then presumably you'd keep an insect always in a juvenile state. While you don't kill the insects, they can never reproduce.
Preventing puberty
It would be the equivalent to using a human contraceptive in which you prevent the onset of puberty. So the child is born, but the child never grows beyond the age of eleven. And that generation dies out and cannot replicate itself. Now the initial idea was: why not use the juvenile hormone itself. It's not a steroid it's a terpenoid, and not that complex a compound. Well one could not use it for the same reason that you cannot use progesterone as a contraceptive: because you'd need daily injections. The juvenile hormone decomposes so quickly - within 24 hours - that it could not be used as an insect control agent. It would not be practical.
The beauty of it
So we set out again as organic chemists to see whether we could make a synthetic compound, which retains the juvenile hormone activity and is longer-lasting? The beauty of the juvenile hormone is that it contains only carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. That is to say, unlike DDT it s not persistent, it metabolises to just water, carbon dioxide and acetic acid - into things that do not stay around; DDT for instance leaves traces that remain for years on end. So here was something that was specific to insects. Here was something that actually worked. We eventually got permission from the Environmental Protection Agency To market this substance So this was the beginning of the 3rd generation of pesticides, it became the method of controlling insects that do their damage in adulthood - mosquitoes, fleas, cockroaches, and flies. These are mostly the public health pests.
Another success
And that company was quite successful, it was eventually acquired by one of the Swiss giants, Sandoz (now called Novartis).. The National Medal for Technology was awarded to me for establishing the company and for developing a practical insecticide.
Shebang: You do have a very powerful business side to your life.
Djerassi: I don't have now. But, yes, I was a bigamist, I was at Syntex, I helped form a number of biotechnology companies -
Shebang: Chairman and CEO of-
Djerassi: Yes, often chairman and CEO, as at Zoecon. And also as a member of the board of directors of various "biotech" companies. For instance Cetus Corportion, where PCR was invented , a business that was eventually bought by Roche. I was on the board of another company, Affymax, and that was bought eventually by Glaxo. [LAUGHTER] That is the function of small companies, to become breeding grounds of new technology and innovation of the type that sometimes you can't achieve in big organisations because they are too stultifying in some respects.
Shebang: A few thoughts, then, about innovation, please. Brainstorming.
Djerassi: I think I would take some credit for understanding that, yes. Actually in my autobiography ("The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse") I wrote a whole chapter on it. There was a company that I had helped found, where I was the chairman for its entire existence until, again, it was acquired. It was a company called originally Synvar, but then renamed Syva. We set that up on the Stanford Industrial Park in the 1960's to develop organic superconductors. This was based on a theory by a well-known physicist at Stanford, William Little, who put forward a theory that certain organic compounds could be superconductors at room temperature, which could be unbelievably important because it would completely revolutionize power transmission.
Lunches
The idea for us was to put a group of bright people together and to work on this. In the end, developing the superconductor didn't work out. But the bright people were there and we worked on a number of other problems. The idea is that if you bring bright people together and there is a small enough group, you have continuous interchange, and you try and marry academia and industry. In this case, all the academic researchers were Stanford professors. Basically they did part-time consulting. That is, we met at lunch every day with a group of young scientists who had been hired. Altogether each lunch time there were about a dozen or so.
Makes sense
Well, if you think about it, we spent more time with these people than we did with our students, but we were just having lunch. You don't see your research students for an hour or two every day. Not in these large research groups. You see, at Stanford as a faculty member you are permitted to spend one day a week on outside consulting, in other words, 52 days a year. In this case we spread it over lunchtimes. One hour or ninety minutes every lunchtime. But this means a concentrated discussion every day.
Brainstorming
That concentration you don't have in your other settings: you do lots of other things, you teach, you have to see students, have meetings, you are interrupted all the time. But you have to eat some time. So we talked while we ate. And I think that had an enormous impact.
The brainstorming was interdisciplinary brainstorming, we had physicists, we had chemists, we had a couple of biologists, pharmacologists, and also people from industry - they put up the money.