The Birkbeck Years
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Read the opening free
4,139 words · no email, no account
No. 070 · Science · Science
Compound S
a biography of Percy Lavon Julian
What the book is
He was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, six years after the Plessy v. Ferguson plaintiff Homer Plessy had been arrested in New Orleans, and the grandson of two formerly enslaved Alabama field hands. He graduated valedictorian of DePauw University's class of 1920 — a young Black man in a class otherwise entirely white — and the chemistry department recommended he abandon graduate study. He earned his Vienna Ph.D. anyway in 1931, returned to a country that would not give him a research-faculty appointment, and went to work for a Chicago paint company.
Ailsa Rennie's biography traces the arc through the Glidden Company soybean-protein laboratory where Percy Lavon Julian synthesised the physostigmine, cortisone, and progesterone precursors that built half of twentieth-century pharmacology, through the 1950 firebombing of his Oak Park house, through the founding of Julian Laboratories in 1953 and its 1961 sale for $2.3 million, and through the National Academy of Sciences election in 1973 — the second African-American member.
What emerges is a portrait of an organic chemist whose work the country kept downstream of his life and whose patents are still cited in the literature of two pharmaceutical industries.
At a glance
- Subject
- Percy Lavon Julian
- Shelf
- Science · Science
- Written by
- Ailsa Rennie
- Chapters
- 18 across 201 pages
- Narrated by
- Miles Ashby
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01MontgomeryRead free
- 02The Attic3,453 words
- 03Harvard Yard3,394 words
- 04Vienna3,039 words
- 05Physostigmine3,305 words
- 06The Paint Company3,317 words
- 07Anna3,342 words
- 08Soy3,140 words
- 09Oak Park3,683 words
- 10Compound S3,612 words
- 11Julian Laboratories3,232 words
- 12The Pill3,119 words
- 13The Civil Rights Chemist3,610 words
- 14One Hundred Patents3,144 words
- 15The Family3,085 words
- 16Recognition3,143 words
- 17Last Reactions3,108 words
- 18The Synthesis3,421 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 201 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-078-2 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby
ISBN 979-8-90623-158-1
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is Compound S about?
Percy Lavon Julian. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Compound S — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,139 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 201 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
