Use of the pill spread rapidly, producing vast economic and social effects. It gave women unprecedented control over fertility, separating sex from procreation. It let couples plan pregnancies and regulate family size, and women plan educations and careers. It also generated debates over promiscuity and the morality of birth control. The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, emphasized its bans on artificial contraception.

Over the years, Dr. Djerassi lectured widely to promote the pill and faced controversies over possible side effects, including increased risks of blood clots, cancer and excessive bleeding during menstruation. He dismissed such claims, but estrogen and progestin doses in the pill were later reduced to cut the risk of side effects.

The pill made Dr. Djerassi wealthy and something of a celebrity as he moved through a series of careers as a professor of chemistry, an insect-control entrepreneur, an art collector, a rancher, an author of science novels and nonfiction books, a poet, a playwright and the founder of an artists’ colony.

“Yes, I am proud to be called the father of the pill,” he told Nicholas Wroe of The Guardian in 2000. “But identifying scientists is really only a surrogate for identifying the inventions or discoveries. Maybe it is true that Shakespeare’s plays would never have been written if it wasn’t for Shakespeare. But I’m certain that if we didn’t do our work, then someone else would have come along shortly afterwards and done it.”

Carl Djerassi was born in Vienna on Oct. 29, 1923, to Samuel and Alice Friedmann Djerassi. His parents were physicians who divorced when he was 6. A brilliant student, he attended schools in Vienna and summered in Sofia, Bulgaria, where his father specialized in treating venereal diseases before penicillin.

In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and 70,000 Austrian Jews and Communists were quickly rounded up, the elder Dr. Djerassi returned to Vienna and remarried his wife in order to take her and Carl out of the country. The marriage was soon annulled, and Carl and his mother made their way to America in 1939, settling in upstate New York, where his mother worked in a group medical practice. His father emigrated to the United States in 1949.

With a scholarship arranged through Mrs. Roosevelt’s intercession, Carl briefly attended Tarkio College in Missouri, then earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in chemistry at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1942, when he was not quite 19. In 1945, he earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin and became a naturalized American citizen.