The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  I knew I had to act quickly to appease Salomons’s wrath; I’d have to pay a visit to Rivka’s father as soon as possible. I had a few urgent pieces of business to dispose of before I was free to take care of it, so I sent Rivka home in the car with Frank, with a letter to give to her father, a letter that, for once, wasn’t dictated to Agnes. Using my own fountain pen and a sheet of Farmacom’s brand-new stationery, I humbly begged Salomons’s forgiveness for being responsible for the state his daughter was in, rhapsodized about her irresistible charms, and declared that, given his permission, I would be honored to marry her.

  Years later, Rivka complained bitterly that no one had ever asked her what she thought about getting married. Since she had come to my office as her father’s messenger, I’d always assumed that she agreed with her father’s ultimatum. Besides, we had no choice in the matter. Rivka had gotten herself knocked up, and once you’ve made your bed, you just have to lie in it. There were only three options for a girl in her condition: you could get rid of the unwanted child, your mother could adopt it and pretend it was one of her own, or you got married; there was no other way out. Today there is a fourth alternative—you can raise the child yourself as a single mother, but as far as its being an improvement over those first three choices, I have my doubts. After seeing what happened to Rosie, I know it can lead to all sorts of problems.

  • • •

  As far as my marriage to Rivka, however, we actually made a good go of it for a surprisingly long time. Of course we were young; I was twenty-seven, Rivka just eighteen. Matrimony had never appealed to me, even as a child, and I had been determined, with every fiber of my being, to hang on to my freedom. But once I found myself in this impossible situation, I resigned myself to the inevitable. And I have to confess that the times in my life when I’ve actually managed to remain monogamous, as I was during the first months of my marriage to Rivka, have been few and far between. It wasn’t twinges of so-called conscience or decency that caused me to be faithful at first; I’ve never been very much bothered by those, luckily. It was quite simply because having her was enough for me. Rivka was energetic, funny, and sensual, and, in spite of her pregnancy, she had such an inexhaustible enthusiasm for sex that, coming on top of my busy and exciting work life at the factory and with Farmacom, it left me with no energy for further sexual escapades. It wasn’t until the birth of our daughter Ruth, when Rivka seemed to lose interest in our love games a bit—understandably so in light of the sleepless nights, the feedings and colic and other afflictions requiring endless consolation, sapping her energy—that I turned to other women. I have never—almost never, anyway—been faithful to one woman again since. But the very fact that Rivka didn’t leave me until twenty-two years and four children later proves that, in spite of everything, I was always able to satisfy her needs. I’m not the type to be with a woman and then ignore her. I’m a man with a big heart, with a great deal of love to give. It’s simply more than one woman can handle.

  10 …

  All my working life I’ve had a framed picture of those two bloody Canadian geniuses hanging on my wall. It’s a sunny day, and they’re posing in front of a low building with the dog whose pancreas they’ve removed. You can tell it’s windy from the ballooning lab coat of the bespectacled forty-year-old and the rippling necktie of the fresh-faced student, still wet behind the ears but confidently smiling into the camera. The one who looks unhappiest is the dog, evidence that it isn’t much fun having to go through life without a pancreas. The dog should have been given the Nobel Prize for his ordeal, but the prize went to those two smug-faced Canadians instead. That photograph makes my blood boil every time I look at it, which is why it’s hanging in such a prominent spot. It’s the perfect goad, the fly in the ointment. Having those two windbags looking down on me every single day provoked the hell out of me. What kept me going was knowing the day would come when I’d triumphantly toss that photo in the trash—the day Rafaël, accompanied by me, of course, would fly to Stockholm to collect the coveted award. I’d have the Nobel diploma mounted in the same frame and hang it right there on my wall, to trumpet the world’s recognition of our work. The fact that, lying here in my bed, I’m still forced to stare at those two assholes, who’ve never grown a day older, means that my dearest wish has never come true. I may have only three years of secondary school under my belt, but I’ve been awarded an honorary doctorate; I’ve sat with government ministers on advisory boards; I’ve been received by the queen; I was part of the prince consort’s inner circle and was given the proud title of “royal merchant.” Not bad, is it, for a boy from the sticks? But that one distinction I most wanted always eluded us, and it still makes me spitting mad.

  • • •

  I can’t remember ever feeling more elated than the day we inaugurated our own laboratory at the De Paauw plant. Not only had Rafaël’s Amsterdam lab been equipped with top-of-the-line apparatus, but a floor of our factory was now dedicated to a second Farmacom laboratory, furnished according to the professor’s specifications. Here the discoveries explored in Amsterdam were to be developed further, and the new hormones readied for commercial production.

  What a contrast there was between the lab and the rest of the plant! I was used to the hustle and bustle of the factories, where everything was aimed at delivering the most merchandise to the widest possible market. Our industrial site had always been a din of clashing sounds. The hiss and whistle of the train ferrying in the livestock to be slaughtered. Trucks with their racing engines and claxons, either bringing in raw materials or being loaded with the finished product for delivery. The loading carts pushed by big bruisers in overalls, their hefty wooden wheels clattering across the cobblestones. All day long the bellowing cattle and men’s shouts provided a deafening jangle, punctuated by the shrill report of the bolt gun shooting a metal pin through a pig’s skull while the dull thud of the sledgehammer sending some calf to its maker produced a steady background hum, accompanied by the crack of the woodcutters’ axes chopping the firewood for the many ovens, the hammering from the carpenter’s shop, and the sigh of the glassblowers’ bellows. Their mournful notes underscored, in a minor key, the shrieks of the pigs smelling death before the pin pierced their brains or the butcher’s knife slit their throats. There was also the clang of cleavers from the slaughterhouse floor, where butchers were busy breaking down the carcasses, and the clatter of typewriters floating out of the offices of the secretaries and accountants (the latter wore white coats for no other reason than to distinguish them from “ordinary” workers), all of it contributing to the sense of urgency and energy pervading the plant.

  But how different it was in the laboratory, our first improvised “hormone factory,” still so vulnerable and new that you felt you had to close the door to the sanctum very gently behind you, afraid the entire place—nothing but a rickety assemblage of glass, cork, rubber, and a few support stands on wobbly tables—would otherwise collapse like a house of cards.

  Nowhere in the company was time of greater essence than here, where the rattle of the teletype machine might at any minute sound the alarm that the hormone we were so desperately trying to find had been discovered by some other lab somewhere else in the world.

  But if there was any such pressure, there was no outward sign of it; the sparsely furnished space was a sea of tranquillity that instilled a feeling of calm and serenity, and I loved to spend time in there. Whenever I stepped into that lab I felt my chest swell with pride, gratified to see my bold initiative playing out here in my own factory, in the form of a squadron of scientists bent over distilling flasks, microscopes, steam baths, and scales. Their white lab coats were spotless in contrast with the workers’ coveralls, which were usually spattered with blood, fat, and feces. To distinguish the biologists from the lab technicians, the former’s coat collars were notched. Leaning against the wall, I liked to watch them work, monitoring the bubbling, fermenting, odorous concoctions while jotting down the odd notation. Invited to peer thro
ugh their microscopes, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was on the slides. The squirmy, slithery, wriggly organisms in those minuscule droplets only gave up their secrets to those who had learned to decipher them. Sometimes I’d feel a stab of regret, and perhaps anger, at the fact that these gentlemen (and even, yes, even the occasional female, for crying out loud!) had been given the right to analyze this stuff, whereas I was dependent on their knowledge, their noodles, their brains.

  I liked to walk past the cages housing the lab animals. This living rabble was nothing like the stacks of pig and beef carcasses dangling in our slaughterhouse. The rabbits, mice, and rats and, later on, roosters, dogs, and apes were confined inside small cages. Depending on what had been injected or surgically removed, they might be either agitated or semi-comatose, some of them whining softly from horniness or pain.

  I have never taken pleasure in the slaughter of animals, but I am not sentimental about it either, the way some people are nowadays. To me killing animals is just as much a part of life as shitting, eating, or making love. All four are necessary, in ascending order of gratification.

  I lived next door to the plant as a child, and so pigs being driven to slaughter was something we took for granted, just as we thought nothing of the fact that in the morning, when the factory opened, a crowd of scruffy men would be gathered outside the gate, like sperm cells milling about inside the fallopian tubes waiting to strike when the time is right. My father would pick out a few of the sturdiest and least filthy men from the throng of yokels and offer them a job for the day. Once his selection was made, he ordered the foreman to tell the rest of the bums to scram; he didn’t like people loitering outside the gates. The dejected look of those fellows as they trudged off reluctantly, muttering darkly and dragging their feet, reminded me of the way the calves moved as they were being led to slaughter. From a young age I understood that there wasn’t any point resisting the law of survival of the fittest, and that you had to make sure you were one of the ones coming out on top.

  Aaron was different; he felt sorry for both the animals and the unemployed scum my father sent packing. Once, when we were very young, as we stood watching, each clutching a sandwich in a clammy little hand, one fellow kept insisting, begging my father to give him a job. “My kid’s sick in bed and he’s starving.”

  The gaunt, emaciated man tugged at my father’s sleeve with one hand and held out the other beseechingly. As the foreman slapped his hand away, Aaron darted forward to offer the man his sandwich. The poor devil reached for it, but my father knocked it out of his hands, sending it flying into in a mud puddle. Aaron received a box on the ear for his trouble, and as the beggar bent down to retrieve the bread, the foreman kicked him in the butt, landing him facedown in the mud. My father and the foreman turned and walked back inside the gate, leaving Aaron standing there bawling, more upset about the man than his own smarting ear. I grabbed my blubbering brother’s hand and dragged him back into the house.

  11 …

  We did eventually manage to secure the licenses for the insulin. It was mind-boggling, the effort Levine and his team put into getting it done. Levine was unstoppable in his determination to turn Farmacom into a world-class outfit, the first to make the insulin drug commercially available in Holland and the rest of Europe. He worked day and night, barely allowed himself time to eat or rest, and demanded the same total commitment from his coworkers.

  His passion for research knew no bounds. For countless days and nights Levine and his assistants rammed massive amounts of animal pancreas through a simple fruit press, twisting the screw a couple of turns tighter every so often to wring out the essence drop by precious drop into a flask placed underneath. Someone had to stay in the lab all night to check that the pressing went on uninterrupted, and Levine did not excuse himself from that duty.

  He was likewise first in line to try out the rudimentary insulin preparation once it was ready to be tested on humans. He had no hesitation about injecting himself with the serum, which could have sent him into a potentially fatal coma. I did try to stop him, chiding him that he was too important to the business to risk his life. He looked at me, smiling, and shook his head.

  “For your age, you are remarkably clever and quick on the uptake,” he said, “and I do appreciate your concern, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. We are about to make this drug available, and we are going to ask physicians to administer it to their patients. Those patients, by volunteering for this trial, will help us to tweak and improve our product. Then does it not behoove me, as the drug’s developer, to assume some of the same risk myself?”

  Levine was a man with a strict nineteenth-century Prussian military sense of ethics. His good name, as he had told me that first evening in the restaurant, was more important to him than his life. Fortunately, the injections didn’t wind up sending him into hypoglycemic shock after all. Later I did ask myself if he had always known he was going to be fine. Was he really the hero I thought him to be, or had he been pulling my leg? I was never quite sure of his true motives. I never knew whether he was playing me for a fool or not. An unpleasant thought. A shadow over what had started off as such an exhilarating collaboration.

  Maybe it would all have turned out differently if there hadn’t been the interruption of the war—the great cataclysm that was, even in the best of all possible cases, a problematic disruption in the lives of the Chosen People of Europe. It set us back at least five years, an eternity in our murderously competitive field, where every second counts. But in actual fact our hands were already tied by 1933, the year those blind, benighted Germans elected the odious goon, which meant that besides dealing with a financial crisis, we faced the danger of losing our biggest export customer. Of course, the fact that the bastard next door was clamping down so hard on our neighbors did bring us an influx of very capable people: all those Silbersteins and Rosenbergs fleeing to the Netherlands from the east. Poor sods, thinking they’d be safe here with us. With such enthusiasm they devoted themselves to the work here in our lab, hoping to get their disrupted careers back on track! Farmacom took in the very top echelon of Europe’s scientific establishment. Highly experienced people we could never have recruited before threw themselves into our hormonal experiments with great gusto, content with just a pittance, so eager were they to leave the humiliations of their fatherland behind. Of course, they were still blissfully unaware that the storm of abuse, accusation, and stigmatization would soon sweep across these chicken-livered lowlands as well, forcing them to their knees once more. And this time for good.

  • • •

  I can get all nostalgic thinking about the early days of my partnership with Levine. Lying here in my metal cage, I can sometimes feel the admiration I had for him then running up my decrepit spine like a shudder, a tremor delivering a stab of pain. Our collaboration had let me hone my inexperienced brain on that formidable intellect, and he in turn seemed to enjoy satisfying my curiosity.

  In business too, we were an unrivaled team. Levine wasn’t merely the instigator and motivator of the scientific research; even though his clinician’s soul was devoted to making the life-saving insulin available as quickly as possible, he was never blind to the commercial aspects of the business.

  Before the ink was dry on the contract that was to bind us so intricately together, he had already started working on a number of articles on the Canadian discovery of insulin for domestic and international medical journals. He didn’t fail to mention, naturally, that his lab, in a joint venture with Farmacom, was the first to make the drug commercially viable. He also started a medical journal of his own, published simultaneously in French, German, and English. A platform to publicize his discoveries around the globe, it attracted a wide readership from the very first issue.

  The extraction of insulin was indeed a masterful achievement, considering that insulin is a protein that’s mixed in with other proteins, and therefore very difficult to isolate. Insulin is as well camouflaged as a
cloud in an overcast sky. And as if that weren’t complicated enough, the stuff turned out to be extremely sensitive to physical and chemical contaminants, which often damaged it and rendered it useless.

  The Canadian eggheads had come up with a biochemical test to identify and isolate the insulin. They had further devised a method that allowed them to measure the blood-sugar level of the dog without a pancreas after injecting it with the stuff. Levine and his team took this a step further; by experimenting with various methods they were able to do some fine-tuning and come up with a preparation of consistent strength from batch to batch. This was a crucial step, for until then the insulin could be either too weak, and fail to prevent a diabetic coma, or else too strong, resulting in death by hypoglycemia. Hundreds of rabbits with the dubious distinction of being the designated guinea pigs in these experiments came to a sad end after being injected with either too weak or too strong a dose. Nor did all of the human patients in the various medical trials survive the experimental insulin. Scientific breakthroughs happen only by trial and, more often than not, error. In those days there were no rules or guidelines governing medical experimentation; drugs didn’t even require a doctor’s prescription. At the time we were introducing the insulin drugs to the market, it was left up to the scientist, in consultation with the physician, to decide when to move the inquiry from lab-animal experimentation to human trials. This did provide a great measure of freedom, unthinkable nowadays; you could experiment to your heart’s content, far more than is permitted today.