Percy Julian: Forgotten Genius (review)

Dr. Percy L. Julian was one of the leading American chemists of the twentieth century. His elegant solutions to the problems of synthesizing complex organic molecules won him international acclaim. He was an acclaimed lecturer, a tireless builder of institutions, and a mentor with dozens of successful students to his credit. His work in industry was central to the development of latex paint, soy-based plastics, synthetic hormones, and dozens of food products. His 1935 synthesis of the antiglaucoma drug physostigmine—a critical step in the treatment of the disease—was cited by the American Chemical Society as one of the landmark achievements in American chemistry. He was instrumental, in the early 1950s, in the development of synthetic cortisone, which freed millions from the half-frozen joints and excruciating pain of rheumatoid arthritis. Julian accomplished all this despite having to scramble, throughout his professional life, for funding, for facilities, and for employment. He never held a professorship at a major research university, never worked for a major chemical or pharmaceutical company, and was marginalized, again and again, by other chemists. Even his election to the National Academy of Sciences—after decades of work that might have won him the Nobel Prize—faced intense, vocal opposition. The reason was depressingly simple: Percy Julian was black.

Born in 1899 and raised in Alabama at the height of the Jim Crow era, Percy Julian possessed two qualities common in great scientists: superhuman determination and towering ambition. The former brought him success not only as a scientist but as a businessman (Julian Laboratories, founded in the mid-1950s, made him a millionaire) and humanitarian (he backed, and helped to bankroll, the civil rights movement). The latter, though it contributed to his success, also made him painfully aware of opportunities lost, and doors closed, to him because of the color of his skin. Family members, colleagues, and Julian himself saw his story as one of great talent squandered by a society too blind to recognize it.

It is one of the glories of Percy Julian: Forgotten Genius that it resists the urge to turn this proud, driven, complex man into a plaster saint. It emphasizes Julian’s determination and hard work—arriving at DePauw University with a shaky tenth-grade education, he went on to graduate first in his class and win election to Phi Beta Kappa—without ever making him just an earnest striver. It illuminates his genius without downplaying the role that fortuitous accidents and rival chemists’ blunders played in his success. It presents him as a man on the make—a scientific entrepreneur always on the lookout for the next great research problem, commercial application, or funding source—while making a strong case that such talents were central to his success. The film also avoids the simplistic, celebratory “X invented Y” style of narrative that plagues many earnest attempts to write black scientists and inventors back into the historical record. It shows how Julian’s discoveries emerged not from isolated flashes of genius bur from a carefully constructed research program grounded in his deep knowledge of both chemistry and industrial processes.

Percy Julian: Forgotten Genius takes viewers deep into intellectual territory that all but a handful will find unfamiliar: industrial organic chemistry. It does so with extraordinary skill, using simple animations, reconstructed experiments, and commentary by “talking-head” chemists to explain how complex organic molecules are manufactured on an industrial scale. It also provides context, deftly sketching the history of the American chemical industry, the jubilation that greeted the first successful tests of cortisone in 1949, and the entrenched racism that blacks faced in northern cities (like Julian’s adopted hometown of Chicago) after World War II. The contextual sections of the film are so strong that they could be used in courses on social history, business history, or the history of science.

Nova’s superb production values prevail throughout the two-hour film. The reenactments of critical experiments are especially...