Luis Ernesto Miramontes and the Pill That Changed the World
Luis Miramontes, a Mexican chemist, accidentally synthesized the base compound for the first oral contraceptive pill at age 26. His groundbreaking discovery revolutionized women's rights and contraception.
When Luis Ernesto Miramontes Cárdenas was still a teenager, a book fell into his hands that would be a call to his vocation: Microbe Hunters, by Paul de Kruif, a text whose pages tell the story of those scientists who, by creating the first vaccines, not only saved millions of lives, but also transformed the world.
“What was narrated in that text motivated my father to move from his native Tepic, Nayarit, to Mexico City. He wanted to study something that combined biology and pharmaceuticals and that, in addition, was beneficial for people. With that objective, he enrolled in the Chemical Engineering program at the National University,” shared his son Octavio Miramontes Vidal, who today is a researcher at the UNAM Physics Institute.
