Why, then, did Miramontes remain an obscure figure? He was a student at a time when science was especially hierarchical. And the fact that Searle beat Syntex to market cut Mexico — and Miramontes — out of the narrative. He was not someone who was seeking fame. This article is part of a series highlighting some of the biggest advances in science over the last century.
For more on the history of our understanding of human reproduction, visit Century of Science: The mystery of reproduction. Miramontes ended up accepting a director position at Searle to earn more money to support his growing family; he and his wife had 10 children. Despite completing all requirements, Miramontes was never awarded a Ph.
Times changed. But the damage had been done. Word of his death traveled so slowly that it took the American Chemical Society two years to issue an obituary. Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions. Not a subscriber? Become one now. Skip to content. Science News Needs You Support nonprofit journalism.
On October 15, , under the direction of Djerassi and Rosenkranz, Miramontes worked out the final step in the process to create a synthetic progestin a progesterone-like hormone.
The expected application of norethindrone was contraception to replace natural progesterone. Experiments with laboratory animals and then humans showed norethindrone to be eight times more potent than natural progesterone, and that was not the only advantage.
Unlike natural progesterone, which had to be injected, norethindrone retained its potency when taken orally. This meant that hormonal contraception could be made much more convenient and attractive to women.
For that to happen, of course, norethindrone would have to be approved by government health agencies around the globe, but that would happen in time. Soon, norethindrone became a prime component of the first oral contraceptive pills, and even today it is used in many contraceptive formulations. Synthesis of norethindrone depended heavily on the segments of the chemical process that Miramontes conducted.
Consequently, the thesis project earned the student his undergraduate degree, and five years later something else: a US patent. Before the research of Miramontes, the hormone progesterone had not been used in contraceptives.
Despite being wrapped up with refining the norethindrone synthesis technique and writing numerous scientific papers about it in the early s, Miramontes did not allow the decade to go by without completing graduate studies at UNAM.
He completed his doctoral research primarily in , although he had begun it in , overlapping with the end of his undergraduate studies. Given his work at Syntex, he was a graduate student with an unusual amount of experience in synthetic chemistry, and after obtaining his doctorate he was appointed to the faculty. He also continued to work in industry and involved himself in a diversity of chemical topics, from pharmaceuticals to organic chemistry, chemistry of the atmosphere , and petrochemistry.
Research in the latter field eventually led him to become Deputy Director of Research of the Mexican Institute of Petroleum. Additionally, his research in petroleum chemistry and atmospheric chemistry started to dovetail in the early s in connection with automobile technology. This was an era when Americans were changing how they thought about cars.
For most of the 20th century, the science revolving around engines and gasoline was completely focused on bolstering performance, giving consumers more power and speed. With only a few exceptions, people were not concerned about what this was doing to the air. In , however, Clair Patterson, a Cal Tech geochemist famous for using lead in special crystals from a meteorite to determine the precise age of the Earth, published a bombshell: Lead from gasoline was accumulating in the environment rapidly at extremely dangerous levels.
For the first time, chemists and engineers working in, and in connection with, the auto industry were thinking about how to improve efficiency and remove toxins from car exhaust.
Given his involvement in both petrochemistry and atmospheric research , Miramontes naturally gravitated to the realm of car exhaust engineering. Lists of patents in the early s show that researchers were approaching the problem from both mechanical and chemical perspectives. For this, he filed a patent in published Leaded gasoline was eventually banned in the United States and by the early s in nearly all other countries.
Phase-out has taken many years across the planet, but as of leaded remained legal only in Yemen, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and North Korea, and with little or any actually being sold in the latter two countries. Among his multiple contributions to world science is the synthesis on October 15, , when Miramontes was only 26 years old, of norethisterone norethindrone , that was to become the progestin used in one of the first three oral contraceptives combined oral contraceptive pills.
For this reason, Luis Miramontes is considered by Lilia Miramontes to be its inventor. Carl Djerassi , Luis Miramontes and George Rosenkranz of the Mexican chemical company Syntex are listed on the patent for norethisterone as its co-inventors.
Djerassi "is now known sometimes as the 'Father of the Pill'". The historians, nevertheless, agree that the invention, or the first synthesis, is the work of Miramontes. For example, the Nobel laureate Max Perutz states that "On October 15th, , the chemistry student Luis Miramontes, working under the direction of Djerassi and the director of the laboratory Jorge Rosenkranz synthesized the compound".
Lecture audiences are always intrigued when I display a slide showing the carefully dated and hand-written lab protocol of the very last step in that synthesis conducted by Miramontes, in which the elements of acetylene are added to impart oral activity. Finally, the very last step of the synthesis method was registered, on October 15, , in page of the Miramontes's personal laboratory notebook signed.
In a essay published in the FASEB Journal , the director of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology said: "Another aspect of the Nobel Prizes that is a perennial topic of discussion concerns those discoveries, inventions, or advances that go unrecognized altogether.
One is the birth control pill. Chang was carried out in the s that led to the first birth control pill. Pincus died in at age The tributaries flowing into the development of the oral contraceptive were numerous and temporally distributed across two decades, going back to the extraction of a substance from the roots of a jungle plant by Russell Marker that was readily convertible to pregnanediol and then to progesterone in two steps, the subsequent chemical synthesis of progestins by Carl Djerassi , Luis Miramontes, and George Rosenkranz , and the discovery by Gregory Pincus and M.
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