It’s 1941 and an up-and-coming Jewish scientist escaping the darkness that has enveloped Europe is making his way to South America and a new beginning. Then Pearl Harbour happens and George Rosenkranz finds himself stuck in Cuba, unable to reach his destination and his academic posting.
True, there are worse places to be stranded than Cuba, but the Cuba of the time was a party island and Rosenkranz was a serious young man, a promising chemical engineer. However, he found a job at a local laboratory where he worked on venereal diseases and hormone synthesis. Thanks to the latter, he was poached by Syntex, a pharmaceutical company in Mexico City, an event that would transform his fortunes, and that of the company itself.
Mexico City may have been isolated from the main centres of scientific research but Rosenkranz still managed to put together a team of brilliant chemists. 
His breakthrough would occur late in 1951 when, with the help of Dr Carl Djerassi, a refugee from Austria, and lab assistant Luis E. Miramontes,  he would succeed in synthesising norethindrone, a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone, that stopped pregnancy. The pill was born and women’s lives were changed forever.
Gyorgy Rosenkranz was the only child of Etel (née Weiner), a housewife, and Bertalan Rosenkranz who ran a dance studio in Budapest. It was a wealthy upbringing, filled with music and the arts. Young Gyorgy was a gifted linguist – he would become fluent in several languages – and a talented bridge player, a passion he would pursue throughout his life even after making his name as a scientist.
And it was his talent for science that, at the age of 17, would take him to Zurich’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to study organic chemistry under Leopold Ruzicka, the future Nobel Prize winner. Ruzicka rated him highly enough to make him his assistant in 1937. 
By the time Rosenkranz gained his doctorate in 1940, Europe, cowed by Hitler, was no place to be if you were Jewish, however brilliant and talented. And so it was that Rosenkranz embarked on the fateful journey that would eventually take him to Mexico, via Cuba. 
Rosenkranz had already tried to produce synthetic hormones while working with Ruzicka in Switzerland; in 1951 he succeeded in synthesising cortisone, a steroid hormone, from inedible yams. That October, he and his team had a breakthrough when they won the scientific race to formulate a synthetic hormone that would inhibit ovulation. 
Strangely, norethindrone, which also had the advantage of being cheap to produce, was at first hailed as a treatment to prevent miscarriage. It would be years before its birth-control capabilities were commercially exploited: years of extensive trials eventually proved it was safe and worked, butmany companies were hesitant to market it for fear of a moral or religious backlash. 
As for Rosenkranz, speaking on the 50th anniversary of his breakthrough, he stressed the scientific values of its development: “I leave to others any debate about the ultimate worth of the pill. We must never forget that original research is the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.” 
Rosencranz was never one to claim all the glory for himself. He would readily point out, that the pill – “was the result of a long chain of events, with many individuals and team players involved.” 
Chemistry may have made his name and his fortune, but bridge also remained a constant in Rosenkranz’s life: a world-class contract bridge player, he won a dozen North American championships, created bidding systems and found time to write 15 books on the subject.
He met Edith Stein, an Austrian Jew and a fellow refugee in Cuba, and they  married in 1945. She was also a top player and they often attended bridge tournaments together. 
It was in 1982, during one such tournament in Washington, that Edith was kidnapped at gunpoint and held captive for two days. A ransom was paid and she was released, after which the police promptly arrested the culprits, one of whom turned out to be a bridge player who often partnered George.
When asked about her ordeal by her son Ricardo, Edith is said to have remarked that, compared to living through the Holocaust, in which the couple lost several family members, it had been easy. 
Edith survives him together with two of their sons, Ricardo and Roberto, and nine grandchildren. Another son, Gerardo, predeceased him.
julie carbonara

George Rosenkranz, born August 20, 1916. Died June 23, 2019