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George Rosenkranz, scientist who fled the Nazis and carried out crucial work on the contraceptive pill and on cortisone – obituary
George Rosenkranz, who has died aged 102, was a scientist who fled the Nazis and became a leading figure in the field of steroid chemistry.
He was part of the team that synthesised a progestin used in the oral contraceptive pill, and also helped achieve the first practically applicable synthesis of cortisone, used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Away from the laboratory, he was a contract bridge world champion whose wife was kidnapped during a tournament in 1984 and held for ransom.
György Rosenkranz was born on August 20 1916 in Budapest and studied Chemistry in Zurich at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate. His mentor was the future Nobel Prize-winner Leopold Ruzicka, who steered him towards steroid research.
Ruzicka also shielded Rosenkranz and other Jewish scientists from scrutiny by Nazi sympathisers in Zurich; but his protégés decided that their presence was putting Ruzicka at risk. “We decided to leave Switzerland to protect him,” Rosenkranz recalled in 2002.
Ruzicka found Rosenkranz a research job in Ecuador, but while he was waiting in Havana for a ship, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he was unable to travel. He was given asylum in Cuba, where he worked on treatments for venereal disease.
Having established himself as a leading figure in the field of hormone synthesis, Rosenkranz was recruited by the Syntex company, which had been founded in Mexico City to synthesise the hormone progesterone from a variety of Mexican yam.
There he convened a research group that included Carl Djerassi, widely known as the “father of the Pill”. Their first triumph was the synthesis of cortisone, their paper on the subject appearing just before similar studies from Harvard and the Merck pharmaceutical firm.
“To have people work productively, you have to build an intellectually challenging environment, allow creative freedom, and insure peer recognition and respect for the individual,” Rosenkranz said.
He and his team moved on to work on progesterone, and in 1956 Syntex was granted a US patent for norethisterone, the progestin medication used in the birth control pill; they had initially seen the drug as a fertility treatment, and as medication for pregnant women to avoid miscarriages.
“I leave to others any debate about the ultimate worth of the Pill,” Rosenkranz said as he accepted an award from the University of Mexico on the 50th anniversary of his work on what became the Pill. He eventually became chief executive and chairman of Syntex, which grew into a billion-dollar company. He wrote hundreds of articles and papers, retiring in 1981.
Rosenkranz, who became a naturalised Mexican in 1949, was an expert contract bridge player who represented his country at three World Team Olympiads and won a dozen North American championships.
In 1984, while Rosenkranz and his wife were attending a bridge tournament in Washington, she was held up at gunpoint outside their hotel. She was put into a van and driven to a motel in Norfolk, Virginia, where she was held captive for two days.
The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $1 million, which was left by her husband at an agreed spot in nearby Alexandria. She was deposited, uninjured, near the White House. Three men were arrested shortly afterwards, one of them a regular bridge partner of Rosenkranz, and the money recovered. The trio all received long prison sentences.
Rosenkranz married, in 1945, Edith Stein, an Austrian who had fled the Nazis and, like her husband, landed in Cuba. She survives him along with two of their sons; a third son predeceased him.
George Rosenkranz, born August 20 1916, died June 23 2019