Russell Marker: Life and Career (1902–1995)

Russell Earl Marker (1902–1995) was an American chemist who never held a doctorate, yet worked out a way to turn a steroid found in wild plants into the hormone progesterone and then carried that chemistry to Mexico, where it became the foundation of a new industry. The process that bears his name, the Marker degradation, and the giant Mexican wild yams he went looking for made progesterone cheap for the first time, and they opened the road that later led to affordable cortisone and to the first oral contraceptive pills. He did all of this in roughly fifteen years of steroid work, and then, at the age of forty-seven, he walked away from chemistry altogether.

This page tells the story of the man rather than the molecules. It follows him from a log cabin on a Maryland farm, through a university career that ended one step short of a Ph.D., into the laboratory where the reference fuels for the octane scale were made, through six years at the Rockefeller Institute and nine at Penn State, and on to Mexico City, the companies he helped to start there and his abrupt retirement. It ends with the long quiet years among reproduction silver, the surprise of his reappearance in 1969, his honours, his death in 1995 and the historic landmark that now carries his name. The chemistry itself, the yams and the industry that followed each have their own page in this wing, linked under Connections.

Table of Contents

  1. A Farm Boy from Hagerstown
  2. Maryland and the Doctorate He Declined
  3. Ethyl Gasoline and the Octane Rating
  4. Six Years at the Rockefeller Institute
  5. Penn State and the Turn to Hormones
  6. A Professor Goes to Mexico
  7. Syntex, Botanica-mex and a Parting of Ways
  8. Leaving Chemistry in 1949
  9. Silver, Silence and the ‘Forgotten Man of Chemistry’
  10. Honours, Landmark and Legacy of a Name
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. A Farm Boy from Hagerstown

Russell Marker was born on 12 March 1902 on a farm near Hagerstown, in western Maryland, in a one-room log cabin. His father worked the land as a tenant farmer — in his 1987 oral history Marker himself used the word “sharecroppers” — and later managed to buy a farm of his own. Russell was the oldest of three children. According to the Science History Institute’s profile and Marker’s own recollections, his father expected him to stay on the farm, while his mother pushed for more schooling.

That schooling was thin in science. The local high school offered only commercial courses, so Marker reached college without any chemistry or physics at all. To qualify for the University of Maryland he first took summer-school courses in mathematics and English, and he entered the university in 1919. The gap in his early education is worth keeping in mind: the man who later rewrote the accepted structure of a family of plant steroids had met his first chemistry lecture as a seventeen-year-old farm boy.

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2. Maryland and the Doctorate He Declined

At Maryland Marker moved quickly. He took his B.S. in 1923 and his M.S. in 1924. The American Chemical Society’s landmark booklet describes the master’s degree as being in physical chemistry, while Marker in his oral history remembered his master’s work as colloid chemistry under Neil Gordon. He then began doctoral research with Morris S. Kharasch, on organometallic compounds and free radicals.

The thesis was accepted. What stopped the degree was a course requirement: the university insisted that he also complete further physical chemistry courses, and Marker would not take them. He refused, and in June 1925 (the date the ACS booklet gives) he left without the Ph.D. The booklet quotes Kharasch warning him that without a doctorate he would end up a “Urine Analyst”. Marker’s own summary of his decision, given more than sixty years later in his oral history, was blunter: “The hell with it.”

The decision shaped the rest of his career. Through the most productive years of his scientific life he would be a full professor without a doctorate, and the University of Maryland only gave him a doctoral degree — an honorary Doctor of Science — in 1987, when he was eighty-five. Around the time he left the university he married Mildred Collins (1899–1985); the sources give the year as 1925 or 1926. The couple had two sons.

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3. Ethyl Gasoline and the Octane Rating

Marker’s first job out of university was as an analytical chemist at the Naval Powder Factory at Indian Head, Maryland, where he stayed for about seven months in 1925. On 1 February 1926 he started at the laboratory of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation in Yonkers, New York, where the company studied engine “knock”: the hard, rattling, uncontrolled burning of fuel in a cylinder that robs an engine of power and can damage it.

To compare fuels, engineers needed a fixed scale with two dependable ends. Marker prepared two very pure hydrocarbons for the work. One was normal heptane (n-heptane), a straight seven-carbon chain that knocked badly. The other was 2,2,4-trimethylpentane, a compact, branched eight-carbon molecule (an “octane”) that hardly knocked at all. Mixtures of the two became the reference fuel for knock testing: a petrol that behaves like a blend of 90 parts of the branched octane and 10 of heptane is rated at 90, and that is the basis of the octane number still printed on fuel pumps.

Accounts of his share differ in strength. The ACS booklet says he “invented” the octane-number system; the Science History Institute says he helped develop the standard gasoline against which octane is rated, and Seeman’s 2023 biographical essay likewise says he helped develop the octane rating. The careful version is the second one: the reference fuels were his laboratory work, inside a larger industrial project. It is a striking first entry on the record of a man later known only for hormones.

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4. Six Years at the Rockefeller Institute

In 1928 Marker moved to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, joining the laboratory of Phoebus A. Levene. Levene is best remembered for his work on nucleic acids, but the projects Marker joined concerned the shapes of molecules: optical rotation (the way certain compounds twist polarised light), molecular configuration, and the Walden inversion, the reaction in which a molecule’s arrangement around one carbon atom flips over like an umbrella in the wind. He published about thirty-two papers with Levene. The sources give his years there slightly differently; the ACS booklet speaks of six years from 1928 and the Science History Institute has him leaving in 1934.

These were not hormone years, but they were training years. Work on optical rotation and configuration is exacting, and it taught Marker to handle small quantities of closely related compounds and to argue about their structures — exactly the skills he would need when he later took on the steroids.

By the early 1930s his interest had turned. He wanted to make hormones from the sapogenins, the soap-forming steroids found in many plants. The Institute declined to support the idea. Part of the reason, according to the Science History Institute and Marker’s own account, was that a senior Rockefeller chemist, Walter A. Jacobs, had concluded from his own studies that sarsasapogenin, the sapogenin of sarsaparilla root, could not be turned into a hormone starting material. Marker later described a sharp confrontation with the Institute’s director, Simon Flexner, over the question; that scene is known only from his 1987 recollection, and the Science History Institute reports the disagreement more mildly. Either way, he decided to leave.

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5. Penn State and the Turn to Hormones

In 1934 Marker went to Pennsylvania State College (now Penn State University) on a fellowship of $1,800 a year, arranged by the chemist Frank C. Whitmore. The point of the move was freedom to work on hormones. His fellowship and his research there were funded by the drug company Parke-Davis, whose research director was Oliver Kamm; according to the ACS booklet the support rose over the years to $10,000 a year. Marker rose with it, from fellow to assistant professor and then to professor.

The 1930s were the decade in which the structures of the sex hormones — testosterone, estrone, estradiol and progesterone — were worked out, and progesterone in particular was scarce and very expensive. In 1987 Marker recalled a price of about $1,000 a gram. At Penn State he first repeated the established European route from cholesterol, which gave a yield of under one per cent, and then made about 35 grams of progesterone from pregnanediol isolated from urine supplied by Parke-Davis, which the ACS booklet calls the largest single lot made up to that time.

The decisive work came in 1938–1940. Marker proposed a new structure for the side chain of sarsasapogenin, showed that it was more reactive than others believed, and found a short sequence of steps that cut it back to the side chain of progesterone. He then applied the same chemistry to diosgenin, a related sapogenin first described by Japanese chemists from a yam, and to trillin from beth root. How the degradation works is explained on its own page, The Marker Degradation.

The output of those years was very large. The ACS booklet counts more than 160 papers in the steroid field, and he worked with some thirty-two or thirty-three students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom went on to careers in industry. He took out no patents on the degradation. According to the ACS booklet, when patent applications had not been filed by a deadline he had set, he declined to assign the rights to anyone, which left the process open for others to use. Marker resigned from Penn State with effect from 1 December 1943.

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6. A Professor Goes to Mexico

Diosgenin was the ideal starting material, but the plants that held it in the United States had roots too small to collect in quantity. Marker and his students, together with botanists, examined more than 400 plant species, mostly in the American south-west. In November 1941, in Texas, he came across a picture in an old botany book of a large wild yam (Dioscorea) that grew along a stream between Orizaba and Córdoba in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Its root, known locally as cabeza de negro, was said to reach about 100 kilograms.

In January 1942, after an official trip with an assigned botanist was abandoned, Marker went on alone by bus. In his own account he found a country store near Córdoba run by Alberto Moreno, obtained two roots and managed to bring one of them back. At Penn State he extracted diosgenin from part of the root and showed it could be made into progesterone. He took the rest to Parke-Davis in Detroit and repeated the work there, but the company decided not to produce hormones in Mexico, and the other companies he approached also declined.

So, in the autumn of 1942, he paid for the work himself — with half his savings, according to the Science History Institute. Moreno’s collectors gathered and sun-dried about ten tons of root; a small extraction plant in Mexico City turned it into a syrup with alcohol; and in New York, in the laboratory of Norman Applezweig, Marker converted the syrup into progesterone in return for one third of the product. The ACS booklet records about three kilograms, worth $80 a gram and the largest lot of progesterone produced up to then. The full story of the roots and the people who gathered them is told on Cabeza de Negro and Barbasco.

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7. Syntex, Botanica-mex and a Parting of Ways

Looking for a partner in Mexico City, Marker reached Laboratorios Hormona, a small firm run by Emeric Somlo and Federico A. Lehmann. Early in 1944 the three founded a new company, Syntex, S.A. (the Science History Institute gives March 1944). According to the ACS booklet, Marker made the company’s first kilogram of progesterone by March 1944, working with four unskilled assistants in Hormona’s space, and within a year the firm was selling progesterone at $50 a gram — a fraction of the prices of a decade earlier.

The partnership was short. Marker left Syntex in May 1945. The ACS booklet describes the cause as “a rancorous dispute between Marker and his partners over profits and their distribution”; this page reports only that description. After his departure Syntex’s production stopped until the chemist George Rosenkranz, hired in October 1945, restored it within months. What Syntex became under Rosenkranz and, later, Carl Djerassi is told on After Marker.

Marker started again almost at once. In 1945 he founded a new firm, Botanica-mex, at Texcoco near Mexico City, financed by Norman Applezweig. There he switched to a second wild yam, barbasco (Dioscorea composita), which the ACS booklet says contained about five times as much diosgenin as cabeza de negro. Botanica-mex made about 30 kilograms of progesterone. Its production stopped in March 1946, which the ACS booklet attributes to “physical harassment of the workers by unidentified outsiders”. The company later passed to a group linked to the Hungarian drug maker Gedeon Richter and ran as Hormosynth (later Diosynth), and Marker directed work there on and off until 1949.

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8. Leaving Chemistry in 1949

In 1949, at the age of forty-seven, only a few years after his best-known work, Marker left chemistry entirely. He did not move to another laboratory, write a textbook or take up consulting. He simply stopped. A 1987 Daily Collegian article, the only source for the detail, says that he destroyed his books and papers when he left.

The timing is striking, because the field he had opened was about to explode. In 1949 the Mayo Clinic announced the dramatic effect of cortisone on rheumatoid arthritis, and in the early 1950s the Mexican yam industry he had started became a major raw-material source for cortisone synthesis and for the progestins later used in oral contraceptives. Marker took no part in any of it. His later explanations, given in interviews decades afterwards, are his own account and are not repeated here; the record shows only the fact of a complete and permanent departure.

Carl Djerassi, quoted in the ACS booklet, summed up what had happened: the Mexican steroid connection “stemmed from the work of one gutsy individualist, Russell E. Marker”, and more stories, “many of them apocryphal”, had been told about him than about almost any other chemist. The apocryphal stories are one reason careful accounts lean on the documents: the papers, the ACS landmark booklet and the oral history he gave in 1987.

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9. Silver, Silence and the ‘Forgotten Man of Chemistry’

For the following decades Marker lived mostly between Mexico City and State College, Pennsylvania. His new occupation was art rather than science: he commissioned Mexican silversmiths to make reproductions of eighteenth-century European silver, including pieces after the work of the French royal goldsmith Thomas Germain and the London silversmith Paul de Lamerie. The ACS booklet and the Science History Institute both record this second life among reproduction rococo silver.

Meanwhile the chemical world largely lost track of him. He was widely believed to have died or simply disappeared. In 1969 the Mexican Chemical Society chose to honour him at the VI International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products in Mexico City (a chronology published with his oral history records that he was made an honorary member). To the surprise of those present, Marker himself walked into the ceremony. The Science History Institute, the ACS booklet and Marker’s own account all tell the story of the reappearance.

The phrase that stuck to him in these years came from a student newspaper. On 4 August 1987 the Daily Collegian at Penn State ran an interview with the retired professor under the headline “The Forgotten Man of Chemistry”, linking his discovery to the Pill. By then the story of the yams and the hormone industry was well known to chemists; the man behind it was not.

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10. Honours, Landmark and Legacy of a Name

Recognition came in his old age. After the 1969 Mexico City honour, Marker received an award at the Chemical Congress of North America, also held in Mexico City, in 1975. In 1974 a German television docudrama about his life, Die Spur führt nach Mexiko, was made with Marker as a consultant. In 1984 Penn State established the Russell Marker Lectures in the Chemical Sciences, and Marker himself endowed a professorship and a lecture series at both Penn State and the University of Maryland. In 1987 Maryland gave him the honorary Doctor of Science, closing the circle on the degree he had declined in 1925.

On 17 April 1987, at Penn State, he gave a long interview to the historian Jeffrey L. Sturchio for the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute). Its transcript, Oral History #0068, is the fullest record of his life in his own words, and much of what is known about the Mexican years comes from it — which is why careful accounts label those episodes as his recollection.

Russell Marker died on 3 March 1995 in Wernersville, Pennsylvania, at the age of ninety-two. (The ACS landmark booklet gives a later March date, but the chronology published with his oral history gives 3 March, and the New York Times obituary appeared on 9 March.) His wife Mildred had died ten years earlier.

In 1999 the American Chemical Society and the Sociedad Química de México designated “The ‘Marker Degradation’ and Creation of the Mexican Steroid Hormone Industry, 1938–1945” an International Historic Chemical Landmark. Plaques were unveiled on 1 October 1999 at Pond Laboratory at Penn State and on 2 December 1999 at the first Syntex site in Mexico City. Today his name survives in the chemical phrase “Marker degradation”, and in the histories of cortisone and the Pill, which begin with a farm boy from Hagerstown and a yam root carried back on a bus from Veracruz.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Seeman JI. Russell Earl Marker and the Beginning of the Steroidal Pharmaceutical Industry. Chem Rec. 2023;23(4):e202300048. PubMed PMID: 36995067
  2. Lehmann PA, Bolivar A, Quintero R. Russell E. Marker. Pioneer of the Mexican steroid industry. J Chem Educ. 1973;50(3):195-9. PubMed PMID: 4569922
  3. Lehmann PA. Early history of steroid chemistry in Mexico: the story of three remarkable men. Steroids. 1992;57(8):403-8. PubMed PMID: 1519271
  4. Rosenkranz G. From Ruzicka’s terpenes in Zurich to Mexican steroids via Cuba. Steroids. 1992;57(8):409-18. PubMed PMID: 1519272
  5. Loriaux DL. Russell Earl Marker (1902–1995). The Endocrinologist. 2008;18(3):107-108. DOI: 10.1097/ten.0b013e31817d4077
  6. Marker RE, Rohrmann E. Sterols. LIII. The Structure of the Side Chain of Sarsasapogenin. J Am Chem Soc. 1939;61(4):846-851. DOI: 10.1021/ja01873a020
  7. Marker RE, Tsukamoto T, Turner DL. Sterols. C. Diosgenin. J Am Chem Soc. 1940;62(9):2525-2532. DOI: 10.1021/ja01866a072
  8. Marker RE, Wagner RB, Ulshafer PR, Wittbecker EL, Goldsmith DPJ, Ruof CH. Steroidal sapogenins. J Am Chem Soc. 1947;69(9):2167-2230. PubMed PMID: 20262743
  9. Laveaga GS. Uncommon trajectories: steroid hormones, Mexican peasants, and the search for a wild yam. Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2005;36(4):743-60. PubMed PMID: 16337559
  10. Djerassi C. Steroid research at Syntex: “the pill” and cortisone. Steroids. 1992;57(12):631-41. PubMed PMID: 1481227

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. PubMed: Russell Marker steroid history
  2. PubMed: diosgenin progesterone history
  3. PubMed: barbasco Mexico
  4. PubMed: Mexican steroid industry history

Further Reading

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Connections