Word: syntex
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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...
Last week Syntex announced that a group of its chemists headed by Dr. George Rosenkranz had at last accomplished the feat, starting with diosgenin from cabeza de negro. They transformed it by 18 chemical steps to "Reichstein's Compound D,* which had been found in minute quantities in the adrenal gland, but had never been synthesized. Only three more steps were needed to turn this compound into cortisone...
Within a year, says Syntex, it hopes to make as much yam cortisone as is now produced from cattle bile. In three years, when its new $2,000,000 plant is finished, it hopes to supply enough cortisone for the entire U.S. demand...
Mexico City, which makes tons of hormones out of a poisonous root found in the lowland jungles. Syntex's leading product, pregnenolone, is a synthetic steroid widely used as a substitute for scarce cortisone in the treatment of arthritis...
...Syntex uses a vegetable raw material, cabeza de negro (niggerhead), a Mexican wild vine whose lumpy, woody root contains a soapy-feeling compound called sapogenin. In its raw state sapogenin is not a hormone, but its molecule contains the basic steroid nucleus.*This can be separated by a simple process and built up chemically into any number of hormonelike compounds...