Summer 2000 -- Vol. 17, No. 1

American Chemical Society Places Landmark on Campus

The American Chemical Society and the Mexican Chemical Society jointly honored Penn State with an International Historic Chemical Landmark that was placed during a ceremony on the University Park Campus on 1 October 1999. The international landmark is only the fifth conferred by the American Chemical Society and the first to be sited on a U.S. university campus.

The landmark commemorates "the Marker Degradation and creation of the mexican steroid hormone industry" and honors the work of the late Russell Earl Marker, Penn State professor emeritus of organic chemistry, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. Marker taught and conducted research on steroid hormones at Penn State from 1934 to 1943.

Shown with the "Marker Degredation" Landmark plaque are: (left to right) Jaime Noriega Bernechea, President-Elect of the Sociedad Quimica de México; James Marker, son or Russell E. Marker; Edel Wasserman, President of the American Chemical Society; and Daniel J. Larson, Dean of the Penn State Eberly College of Science. Photo: David G. Shelly, Penn State

The text of the landmark plaque states, "In Pond Laboratory, Russell E. Marker achieved the first practical synthesis of the pregnancy hormone, progesterone, by what now is known as the Marker Degradation. After discovering an economical source of his starting material in a species of Mexican yam, Marker commercialized his process in 1944 at Syntex, S.A., which he founded in Mexico City with Emeric Somlo and Federico A. Lehmann. This low-cost progesterone eventually became the preferred precursor in the industrial preparation of the antiinflammatory drug cortisone. In 1951, Syntex researchers synthesized the first useful oral contraceptive from Marker's starting material. Syntex and its competitors in Mexico thus became a powerful international force in the development of steroidal pharmaceuticals."

In his nine years at Penn State, Marker published 160 papers and developed a chemical synthetic technique that bears his name, the Marker Degradation, a process still used in the large-scale industrial production of many steroid hormones. Just as important, Marker discovered a cheap source of his preferred starting material--a Mexican yam.

Without Marker's progesterone as the starting material, cortisone would have been too expensive to use in the treatment of arthritis. Marker's discoveries also were key links in the chain that led to the development and commercialization of the birth-control pill.

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