NOVA

(soft music) -

Dr. Julian

No Negro has yet obtained his master's degree in chemistry at Harvard and so I'm up against a hard situation again. -

Dr. Anderson

When Julian arrived at Harvard in 1922, the racial climate was probably worse than it had been at any point in the 20th century. -

Narrator

President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had set the tone by banning black students from the dorms in Harvard Yard. Julian sailed through his first year and earned his master's degree in the spring of 1923. He continued his studies for three more years, but left Harvard -

Train Conductor

Ticket? without his doctorate. Years later, he would bitterly tell friends he had been denied the teaching assistantship. he needed to stay in school. -

Dr. Anderson

Doubt you're gonna be a teaching assistant and teach white students. That was a no-no. That's just hardly acceptable at that time, in that place. If he were denied that, you were also denied the opportunity to finance your education. -

Narrator

Julian spent an unhappy year teaching at a small black college near Charleston, West Virginia then his fortunes turned. (train whistles) He was invited to join the faculty at the nation's most distinguished black university, Howard University, in Washington, DC. Julian went straight to work, designing a new chemistry building and honing a distinctive lecture style. -

Dr. Julian

I should warn you that scientists are traditionally poor speakers because they have a hard time letting go of their gobbledygook. (class laughs) "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home" becomes impossible when you must call the ladybird, Coccinella bipunctata. (class laughs) (soft music) -

Narrator

Despite his growing stature at Howard, Julian was still determined to earn his PhD. In 1929, he finally got his chance. He won a fellowship that allowed him to take a leave from Howard to study at the University of Vienna in Austria. He was about to begin a lifelong inquiry into the chemistry of plants. -

Dr. Petsko

For thousands of years, long before there was such a thing as the science of chemistry, people were fascinated by plants because they knew the plants contain substances that could affect people. I mean, coffee will keep you awake. Tobacco contains something that will calm your nerves. Foxglove contains an extract that'll affect your heart. And the whole goal of chemistry in the early part of the 20th century was to understand what these natural products were, to characterize their chemical structures, and to figure out how to make them. This was called natural products chemistry. It was the main branch of chemistry and in 1929, Vienna in Austria, was the seat of natural products chemistry and that's why Percy Julian went there. -

Narrator

Julian arrived at Vienna's Chemie Institute with huge crates of ground glassware. Items the Viennese students had heard about, but never seen. -

Dr. Witkop

The unpacking became a big ceremony surrounded by fellow students who oohed and aahed about the wonders that came out of these crates. -

Narrator

Among the onlookers was Josef Pikl, a chemist who would become one of Julian's closest friends and collaborators. They had come to Vienna to study under the renowned scientist, Ernst Spth. Spth was a giant in the field of natural products chemistry. He had a particular interest in a family of compounds called alkaloids. By 1929, it was known that an alkaloid from the root of a common Austrian shrub called Corydalis cava was effective in treating pain and heart palpitations. Spth asked Julian to find out why. Members of the alkaloid family all have one or more nitrogen atoms but otherwise their structures vary widely which presented Julian with a formidable challenge. -

Dr. Petsko

He was working in some very difficult chemistry. When you don't know anything about what the structure is of the material you're isolating, you have to tear your molecule apart, atom by atom and try to deduce the structure. -

Dr. Ringe

It's like finding a needle in a haystack. It requires stubbornness. It requires focus. It requires repeating over and over the same kinds of processes until the answers come out. -

Narrator

Slowly the answers did come. In his second year, Julian finally identified the active alkaloid in Corydalis cava, his first chemical triumph. This work with Spth would be the foundation of his future career. (soft music)