Perspectives in Health Magazine
The Magazine of the Pan American Health Organization
Volume 7, Number 1, 2002

Mexico's Pill Pioneer
by Gerald S. Cohen

From Zurich to Havana

Rosenkranz, a scientist and businessman, did not set out to solve the entrenched sociological problems of family planning and population growth. But he has indisputably clearly helped move these issues forward, and his lifetime of work in the synthetic production of steroids has helped relieve the suffering of millions afflicted with arthritis, Addison's disease, bursitis, and other ailments.

Rosenkranz circa 1950, draws a diagram of a steroid molecule. With other Syntex Corp. scientists, he won the high-stakes race to efficiently synthesize cortisone. (Photo courtesy George Rosenkranz)

Discovering what makes a man like Rosenkranz tick does not come easily. Throughout his life, Rosenkranz he has been a private individual who has granted few interviews. That sense of privacy was reinforced in his senior years when his wife, while attending a bridge match with him in Washington, D.C., was kidnapped at gunpoint by three individuals demanding a reported $1 million ransom. All ended well, but one gets the sense that Rosenkranz, who today splits his time between Palo Alto, Calif., and Mexico City, has learned not to reveal more than necessary about himself or his family. Still, one can begin to understand him by examining the body of his work, the company he built, and the manner in which he has derived--and continues to derive--energy for his many projects.

Rosenkranz's career began taking shape just as the storm clouds of World War II were starting to gather in Europe. The Budapest-born scientist earned his chemical engineering degree in 1938 and a doctorate in technical sciences in 1940 at the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. It was one of those places where, as Rosenkranz puts it, "a number of Nobel Prize winners were running around." He was fortunate to be appointed research assistant to one of these, Leopold Ruzicka, a Nobel Prize winner known for his work in steroid chemistry. The relationship that developed between Rosenkranz and Ruzicka was more than just that of student and teacher; Ruzicka was a mentor to Rosenkranz but also a guardian of sorts. "He was protecting the Jews in Zurich," Rosenkranz recalls.

Although Switzerland was a relatively safe place to be in those unsettling years, Nazi sympathizers were still a menacing presence. Rosenkranz and about six of his Jewish colleagues did not feel entirely comfortable in the country; even worse, they understood that their presence could have adverse effects on Ruzicka. "There was a lot of pressure on him, so we got together and we decided to leave Switzerland to protect him."

Most of the students came to the United States, but Rosenkranz accepted a position in Quito, Ecuador, as chairman of an organic chemistry department. He took a boat first to Havana, where he would have to wait three weeks for passage to Ecuador. The Ecuador-bound vessel never came, and then Pearl Harbor intervened. It seemed the war was following Rosenkranz. Then President Fulgencio Batista of Cuba issued a decree allowing all refugees to stay and work, so Rosenkranz decided to remain and took a job with the country's largest pharmaceutical firm, where he became director of research.

Over the next four years, Rosenkranz maintained an interest in making steroid hormones, which were understood to be critical for such key physiological functions as metabolism, growth, and sexual reproduction. It was also known that hormone deficiencies could lead to a number of illnesses, including rheumatoid arthritis, infertility, and Addison's disease. One of the biggest challenges with steroid research, however, was that these hormones were enormously expensive because they had to be extracted from animal glands. Huge numbers of animals had to be slaughtered to derive small quantities of the substance.

Rosenkranz was familiar with the research of Russell Marker, a maverick and mercurial chemist from Pennsylvania State University, who in the 1930s became convinced that certain plants could be an abundant and easy-to-convert source of steroid raw materials. Marker had spent a decade researching sapogenins, a group of toxic steroids that could be obtained by degrading plant compounds known as saponins. Sapogenins have a chemical structure similar to cholesterol, the starting material for steroids in the human body. In 1939, Marker figured out the exact molecular structure of sapogenins and devised a method for converting the sapogenin molecule into a molecule identical to the pregnancy hormone progesterone.

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