Miramontes was a graduate student, twenty-six or so, and it's his notebook page from 1951 that carries the synthesis. The problem was the gut: progesterone gets taken apart before it can do anything, so you have to hang the right group on the molecule to make it survive the trip. They built it up from a steroid out of a Mexican yam. He worked it out on the bench, and it worked.
The barbasco was dug by hand, mostly by campesinos in Veracruz and Oaxaca, up to the knees in wet ground. It's a climbing vine with a tuber that can run heavy — people hauled them out in sacks for a few centavos a kilo while the chemistry was making its name in Mexico City.
The patent went in that same year, 1951, and then the paper trail takes over — the first oral contraceptive cleared for that use in the States came in 1960, and the norethisterone version a couple of years behind it. A bench afternoon, then a decade of committees.