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but obtaining them from European [[pharmaceutical companies]] produced from animal extracts was extraordinarily expensive.<!--
--><ref name="maisel">{{Cite book|author=Maisel, Albert Q. |year=1965 |title=The Hormone Quest |location=New York |publisher=Random House}}</ref>
In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances—the steroids. These include cholesterol, bile acids, sex hormones, and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands. The medicinal potential of various steroids quickly became obvious, but extracting sufficient quantities of steroids, which exist in minute amounts in animal tissue and fluids, was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products, chemists were called upon to mimic nature by creating these steroids in the lab, and later by modifying them to make them safer and more effective as drugs. Chemists found starting materials in certain plant substances that were also steroids. Percy Lavon Julian (1899–1975), Russell Earl Marker (1902–1995), and Carl Djerassi (b. 1923) were among those scientists who participated actively in the synthesis and large-scale production of steroids—both cortisone and the sex hormones—from plant compounds.<ref>http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/chemistry-in-history/themes/pharmaceuticals/restoring-and-regulating-the-bodys-biochemistry/julian--marker--djerassi.aspx</ref><ref>http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=215771</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=sTZ19DVTHt0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=true|title=Chemistry: The People Behind The Science|last=Cullen, Ph.D.|first=Katherine|publisher=Chelsea House|location=New York|isbn=0-8160-5462-2|pages=103-114|date=2006|accessdate=February 17, 2012}}</ref>
[[Percy Lavon Julian]] is most noted for his synthesis of cortisone from soybean sterols used to treat inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis which laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of corticosteroids and birth control pills.<ref>http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=215771</ref>The soy stigmasterol was easily converted into commercial quantities of the female hormone, progesterone, and the first pound of progesterone he made, valued at $63,500 was shipped to the buyer in an armored car! <ref>http://lipidlibrary.aocs.org/history/Julian/index.htm</ref>It took the [[USDA]] until June 13,2008 ,in a technical abstract, to recognize Dr. Julian. Giants of the past: Percy Lavon Julian, a forgotten pioneer in soy.<ref>http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=215771</ref>
In 1939, [[Russell Marker]], a professor of [[organic chemistry]] at [[Pennsylvania State University]], developed a method of synthesizing [[progesterone]] from plant steroid sapogenins, initially using sarsapogenin from [[sarsaparilla]], which proved too expensive. After three years of extensive botanical research, he discovered a much better starting material, the [[saponin]] from inedible Mexican yams (''[[Dioscorea mexicana]]'') found in the rain forests of [[Veracruz]] near [[Orizaba]]. The saponin could be converted in the lab to its aglycone moiety [[diosgenin]]. Unable to interest his research sponsor [[Parke-Davis]] in the commercial potential of synthesizing progesterone from Mexican yams, Marker left Penn State and in 1944 co-founded [[Syntex]] with two partners in [[Mexico City]] before leaving Syntex a year later. Syntex broke the monopoly of European pharmaceutical companies on steroid hormones, reducing the price of progesterone almost 200-fold over the next eight years.<!--
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