Marker degradation

[1] The discovery of the Marker degradation allowed the production of substantial quantities of steroid hormones for the first time, and was fundamental in the development of the contraceptive pill and corticosteroid anti-inflammatory drugs.

[1] The discovery of the Marker degradation led to the development of a fine chemical industry in Mexico which, starting from scratch and in less than ten years, supplied more than half the human sex hormones sold in the United States.

Sarsasapogenin was too expensive to be a commercial precursor to other steroids, so Marker set about looking for richer sources of sapogenins which were more closely related to progesterone.

He identified one candidate in Trillium erectum ("Beth root" or "Wake-robin"), a sapogenin called diosgenin which had previously been found in Japanese yams (Dioscorea tokoro).

He eventually hit upon another species of Dioscorea, a Mexican yam known locally as cabeza de negro,[note 3] whose tubers were reported to grow up to 100 kg (220 lbs) in weight.

[1] However Marker split with his partners in May 1945 in a row over profits, and set up a new company called Botanica-mex, which would later be sold to Gedeon Richter Ltd. and renamed Hormonosynth (later Diosynth).

[1] The difficulties in fine chemicals manufacture in Mexico were indeed considerable: there was a severe shortage of trained chemists and indeed no doctoral program in chemistry at any Mexican university.

[1] They hired George Rosenkranz, a Hungarian organic chemist trained at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) who had been stranded in Cuba by the entry of the United States into World War II, to replace Marker.

Rosenkranz also hired foreign talent for Syntex, including the Austrian Jewish refugee (and naturalized American) Carl Djerassi and the Uruguayan Alejandro Zaffaroni.

[10] By this time, Syntex and its Mexican competitors (including Percy Lavon Julian, the first African-American chemist inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences) were supplying more than half the human sex hormones sold in the United States,[note 5] and the price of progesterone had dropped to $2/gram.