This morning, I was looking into my medicine cabinet mirror (not for long; I’m not vain in the morning), when the word “steroid” popped up in my head.
In that medicine cabinet were several steroid-based medications which have made my life much more comfortable, if not saved my life entirely. One of them is a prednisone eye drop which I use whenever I have an outbreak of a heretofore unknown eye inflamnation called uveitist. (I’m not sure where my uveas lurk and opthalmologists have no idea why this happens.) Never mind all our ignorance: without the drops, my eye(s) would be painful and possibly worse as days go by. With the drops, the pain goes away immediately and the inflammation whittles down and disappears in a few weeks.
Prednisone was the drug my father took during his emphysema. It extended his life.
And then I’ve got this chronic lung condition called bronchiectasis. It’s not terminal and is manageable with a variety of drugs, some of which may contain cortisteroids.
So I started thinking, geez, steroids are sort of miracle drugs! How many people do I know who take them?
And the thought which naturally followed (because I’m a curious person and want to know these things) was: who developed steroids?
Perplexity.com answered my call. It was Percy Lavon Julian, an African-American scientist who managed to derive many vital drugs despite living with such vile racism he could not find a place to eat in the mostly white town where he first went to college.
I both honor Dr. Julian and thank him.