Appendix:  Short Biographies

Professor. Dr. Adolf Butenandt was born on 24th March 1903 in Bremerhaven-Lehe. Butenand's scientific work mainly covered the area of steroid hormones. In the 1920's and 30's, he and his collaborators had a significant part in isolating and characterizing female and male sex hormones.

In 1939, ten years after he had analyzed the structure of estrone, Butenandt received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry because of his pioneering investigations of sex hormones.


Professor Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna in 1923. Chemist Djerassi played an important role in the development of the pill and calls himself "the mother of the pill" in his autobiography. He is a scientist, researcher, inventor, artist, musician, author and cosmopolitan all rolled into one. But most importantly, he is a synthetic chemist, who has systematically contributed to the development of organic chemistry, the science of hydrocarbon compounds.

In the 19th century, organic chemistry started as the attempt to analyze the structure of chemical substances, which had been isolated from vegetable or animal sources. After that, synthetic chemists could begin their work. Djerassi did this with great dedication and success. He synthesized cortisone, a hormone made in the adrenal glands, and he had a significant part in the invention of the pill. As the head of a team of chemists at the company Syntex in Mexico City, on 15th October 1951 he managed to create the first synthetic progestin, an important ingredient of contraceptive pills. Today, the chemist teaches at the famous Stanford University and also writes plays. He is still doing research on steroids and antibiotics.


Professor Dr. Walter Hohlweg was born in Vienna on 10th October 1902. At the age of 24, he started his professional career as an endocrinologist. In 1928, he joined Schering AG. A mere two years later, he became the head of the department for hormone research.

After the war, he became head of the laboratory of the gynecological hospital at the Charité (university hospital in Berlin). In 1952 he became professor of endocrinology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and from 1962 until 1973 he was head of the hormone laboratory at the university women's hospital in Graz, Austria.
In the course of his extraordinarily successful professional career, Hohlweg published more than 200 pioneering articles. He died in 1992.


Professor Dr. Hans Herloff Inhoffen was born on 9th March 1906 in Döhren near Hanover. In 1930 he qualified as a chemist at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1935 he started work in the main laboratories of the Schering-Kahlbaum AG; and only one year later he became head of the chemical pharmaceutical research. From 1946 until 1974 he was professor and director of the chemistry institute at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Inhoffen retired in 1974, and dies in 1992.


Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus was born in 1903 in Boston, USA. From 1950 onwards Pincus, a biologist and physiologist, developed and tested hormonal contraceptives for the very first time, and thus established the first practicable and effective birth control method. 


Margaret Sanger was born on 14th September 1878, as the sixth of eleven children of the Higgins family in Corning, New York. She grew up in a strictly religious Catholic family.

In New York City she joined the Social Democratic Party and organized strikes. As a nurse, she mainly looked after pregnant women, and talked with them about sexuality. In 1912 she began writing a regular column about sex education for the New York Call. It was published under the headline "What Every Girl should know". Over and over, Sanger's work was censored. The suffering of women, who often tried to bring up numerous children in bitter poverty, and her mother's early death, made her a proponent of birth control. From 1917 onwards, she published an educational magazine called "Birth Control Review“. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League and in 1922 the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. In 1927 she founded the World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

Sanger's work was constantly obstructed. In particular, she had to fight against the so-called "Comstock Law" dating from 1873, a U.S. Federal law that penalized the distribution of information about birth control. However, her efforts were not very successful. As late as 1936 the law was lifted by a court of law in regard to doctors, and only much later, in 1971, was it abolished completely. 

In the early 1950's, science was making amazing advances, she could convince Gregory Pincus to search for an effective female contraceptive. In 1952 Margaret Sanger founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), whose German branch is called Pro Familia. Sanger was president of IPPF until 1959. When she finally retreated into her well-earned retirement, IPPF was the largest private organization for family planning worldwide. Margaret Sanger died on 9th June 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 88, only a few months after the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize birth control for married couples.