John Jacob Abel to successfully isolate the neutral base of epinephrine by adding ammonium to highly concentrated extract, a method Abel himself tried but failed due to the use of low concentration of extract. After Takamine's success, Abel himself remarked, with great candor, "The efforts of years on my part in this once mysterious field of suprarenal, medullary biochemistry, marred by blunders as they were, eventuated, then, in the isolation of the hormone not in the form of the free base but in that of its monobenzoyl derivative." Together with L.G. Rowntree and B.B. Turner, Abel devised what they called a "vividiffusion" apparatus,
John J. Jacob (Kentucky) development.) Together with George Keats, in 1841 Jacob was elected to Louisville's City Council for the Fourth Ward. He was a major contributor to Louisville's Blind Asylum and the City Hospital. In 1842, he erected Lyndon Hall, now part of the Hurstbourne Country Club's clubhouse, on his estate in what is now Hurstbourne. His papers are held by the Filson Historical Society's Special Collections in Louisville. In 1811 John J. Jacob married Anne Overton Fontaine, sister-in-law of his partner Thomas Prather in 1811. She bore three children before dying in 1819. In 1822 Jacob married again, to Lucy Donald Robertson