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Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

 

Photo by permission of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Professor Carl Djerassi died in San Francisco on 30 January 2015 at the age of 91.

Characterised in the popular press as ”the father of the contraceptive pill”, he was a pioneer in many fields: steroid chemistry and optical rotatory dispersion in the 1950s, the application of mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy to organic chemistry in the 1960s, computer-aided structure determination in the 1970s.

Djerassi’s new approach to structure determination came to Cambridge through the appointment of his postdoc, Dudley Williams in 1964, a lineage continued to today through Jeremy Sanders and Chris Hunter

In later life he switched from chemistry to art collecting and writing science-in-fiction plays and novels. Djerassi was also a donor to the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, creating the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in memory of his late wife.