Word: steroided
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Scarce and expensive drugs are the potential jackpot payoffs of pharmaceutical chemistry. Right now one of the most valuable is the steroid hormone, cortisone, which sells at wholesale for $23 a gram. Reason: under present commercial methods, it takes the bile from 1,000 tons of cattle to make a month's supply of cortisone for a single arthritis patient...
Chemical Trick. Some hormones are not difficult to make in this way. Syntex Inc. of Mexico City, for example, has been making sex hormones (testosterone, progesterone, etc.) out of an inedible wild yam called cabeza de negro, which yields a substance containing the four-ringed steroid nucleus. But cortisone is tougher. For one thing, its molecule has an oxygen atom attached to one of its carbon atoms (No. 11), and to place that oxygen in the correct spot is a difficult chemical trick...
...Code Words. If all this works out (there may be unforeseen difficulties), it is good news for those patients who are helped by cortisone. Perhaps even more promising is another aspect of the Syntex accomplishment. The steroid hormones are, in effect, "code words" which help to control the cells of the body. They are all very similar, built around the same nucleus, but the slightest difference (such as the shift of an oxygen atom from one carbon atom to another) changes their effect. Medical researchers would like to try hundreds of steroids to see what each can do to make...
...carbon ring and one methyl (CH3) group. Step by step he attached more atoms, carefully choosing his reactions so that the atoms would fall in the proper places. After some 20 laboratory steps, his 22 Ibs. of original raw materials were reduced to 1/28 oz. of a genuine steroid. The compound's molecule has the steroid nucleus with an oxygen atom attached at one end and a carbome-thoxy (C02CH3) group at the other...
...substance is not yet cortisone. He must add another oxygen atom in the proper spot, and must exchange his carbomethoxy group for a dihydroxyacetone sidechain. In the process it will also be necessary to alter the double bonds that now join some of the atoms in his steroid (see diagram). But Chemist Woodward's cautious colleagues agree that the toughest part of the job seems to be over...