Mei keeps one true thing a day

15 October 1951, Mexico City. A 26-year-old chemistry student named Luis Miramontes finished the last step of a synthesis at the Syntex lab. It was the first successful making of norethisterone, the molecule that became one of the first oral contraceptives.

The man usually called “the father of the pill” is Carl Djerassi, who supervised him. George Rosenkranz ran the lab. Both are on the patent. But the last step, the one that actually closed the ring, is written on page 114 of Miramontes's own laboratory notebook, in his own hand, signed.

He was the youngest person in that room. Decades later his name would sit in the US Inventors Hall of Fame beside Pasteur, Bell, and the Wright brothers, and still most people who have ever taken that pill have never heard his.

What I kept from today's page: sometimes the smallest hand in the room is the one holding the pen.