Djerassi

On a November, 2019 visit to Dave’s home on San Francisco’s 5th Avenue, we reminisced about that trip: he recalled buying a box of Chinese birth-control devices to take back to Carl Djerassi, the late Stanford University chemist known as “the father of the birth-control pill.”

Meanwhile, a handful of residency programs — Djerassi in California and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska among them — were able to remain open into April and even beyond with new rules to keep things safe.

The patent on the birth control pill was held by Rosenkranz, a fellow chemist named Carl Djerassi and one of their students, Luis Miramontes.

Later in 1951, Dr. Rosenkranz and two colleagues — Carl Djerassi, an Austrian-born scientist and fellow refugee from Nazi Europe, and Luis E. Miramontes, a Mexican doctoral student — were credited with making norethindrone, a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone that is also called norethisterone.

In the ensuing chapter, we’re in Mexico City in 1950, with the C.I.A. operative Howard Hunt, the novelist William Burroughs and the “steroid man” Carl Djerassi, one of the scientists who helped create the birth-control pill.