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

A trick with yams

An inedible yam called cabeza de negro, which grew wild in Mexico, proved to be a very practical source for a sapogenin called diosgenin. On one trip to Mexico, Marker gathered 10 tons of the root, succeeded in producing about three kilograms of progesterone, and then searched for partners to fund his work. After Parke-Davis rejected him, he pored through a Mexico City phone book and located Laboratorios Hormona. The tiny firm founded by two European refugees, Emeric Somlo and Frederick Lehmann, understood the enormous financial potential of the process. On Jan. 21, 1944, they incorporated Syntex, with the intent of using Marker to help synthesize pure crystalline progesterone for pharmaceutical companies. With an initial capitalization of $100,000, Syntex was able to construct additional laboratories and synthesize 30 kilograms of progesterone within the first 12 months. Before the year was out, however, Marker had a disagreement with his partners, pulled up stakes, and took key components of the synthesis process with him.

Rosenkranz with his Syntex staff and the cabeza de negro yam, which yelded the raw material needed for the synthesis of cortisone. (Photo courtesy George Rosenkranz)

The date of the interview was Aug. 6, 1945, the day the Enola Gay dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. Rosenkranz, and most everyone else in the Western Hemisphere, was at first unaware of the event. In Mexico City it was a beautiful day. "I saw the blue sky, the volcano, and heard this music outside my hotel window," he recalls. "An organ grinder was playing a hand organ downstairs. This was fantastic. I immediately fell in love with Mexico."

The job interview was not exactly what Rosenkranz had expected. It soon became clear that Marker had left his former partners in a fix. Critical ingredients for the synthesis were hidden or unmarked, and the process itself was a mystery to Somlo and Lehmann. As a test, the partnersy gave Rosenkranz a lab coat and asked him to perform the last step in the progesterone synthesis process, which was to make the catalyst aluminum isopropylate. Rosenkranz had done the procedure many times before; it simply required starting a reaction between aluminum and isopropyl alcohol by dipping aluminum foil in mercury chloride. "It was a little trick that anybody with my training who worked in a laboratory would know," Rosenkranz says. "You need the catalyst to start the reaction, and the reagent is necessary to make the progesterone." All went well, and Somlo and Lehmann were flabbergasted. "They thought I was Houdini," Rosenkranz says.

The owners of Syntex pointed to a stack of unfilled orders for progesterone and offered him a job on the spot. Although Syntex was a risky proposition at that point, the future wasn't so bright in Cuba either. Rosenkranz found himself frustrated by the unavailability of critical supplies. "I only had hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, benzene, and alcohol," he says. "I had to make my own ether." After considering their proposition, which included a share of the profits and stock options, he turned his thoughts to the potential benefits of mass-producing steroids. He accepted their offer. In the next breath he called Havana and proposed marriage to his Viennese-born girlfriend, who remains his wife to this day. Two months later Rosenkranz began fulfilling orders for progesterone. "I decided I wanted to make Syntex the Dupont of Mexico," he says. "Little did I know."

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