Free The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt Page B

well.
    “I’d like to name the rutting compound ‘Genesis’—as in ‘creation,’ ” he clarified.
    I stared at him, appalled. “Genesis? What in hell has got into you? A direct reference to God—it’s unthinkable!” I could just see the frown on the pasty visage of the pastor, who had already been around several times asking anxious questions about the drugs we were developing, and had implied that with our most recent discoveries we might be stepping on God’s toes, contravening the meekness that behooved mankind.
    “Exactly,” Levine chuckled. “We are unlocking the secrets of creation. The name Genesis shows that we are taking over God’s racket …” He took a sip of his cognac, observing me through half-closed eyes.
    “Rafaël,” I said, “you may enjoy your little joke, but I’m the one who has to get the stuff sold. A product invoking the work of God doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding on a global scale. I’m having enough trouble as it is trying to allay the clergy’s mistrust, and it’s essential that we avoid drawing their attention to our work. So no, Genesis doesn’t exactly strike me as the ideal name for it.”
    Levine chortled. “Too bad; I just thought I’d give it a try.” He promised to find another name. We were calling it Preparation 288 for now, since in Rafaël’s lab both the experiments and the test subjects had numbers assigned to them. Then he told me there were indications that the new drug might cure women’s menstrual pains, help young mothers with lactating problems, and ease or even overcome the menopausal complaints of older women. And it probably had even more benefits that had yet to be discovered.
    • • •
    On the same occasion he told me of the latest breakthrough, from Germany. There a scientist had established that the pituitary gland, that little appendage of the brain no larger than a chickpea and until now thought to have no particular function, exerted considerable influence on our rutting hormone. Small pieces of the frontal lobe of a cow’s pituitary gland had been implanted into immature female mice. A hundred hours later, all the mice were in heat.
    “This might just be the Master Gland,” said Levine, pronouncing the last two words as if he were talking about Alfred Nobel himself. “That ugly little appendage could very well be the pilot in the hormonal world’s cockpit. Pivotal, this! We must get to work on it immediately. It’s a fantastic discovery, quite definitely up our alley; we haven’t a day to lose, and I’ll need more manpower.”
    This was par for the course. The De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co.’s contribution to Levine’s laboratory, as stipulated in the original contract, turned out to be just an initial down payment on a never-ending stream of orders and requests for more money to fund further research and augment the team of scientists. One chemist for each new drug was Levine’s motto. He seemed to think of our firm as some fat milk-cow, his own personal gravy train.
    Both in Amsterdam and at our factory, dozens of experiments were being conducted at once; one group worked out of the university lab, while a scant fifteen men in white coats with notched collars on the top floor of the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. were trying to figure out the exact composition of the secretions capable of producing such amazing results.
    In her office next door to our improvised lab, my perky and able Agnes was busy all day dispatching letters and telegrams toevery corner of the world and forwarding lab results to Amsterdam. But she had to spend even more of her energies on a constant flood of demands and admonitions reaching us from Amsterdam by mail, telephone, and telegram needing immediate attention. There was no end to the shopping lists: rat cages, incubation boxes, aluminum containers, pressing bags, stone pots, meat presses, hundreds of live rabbits, mice, and rats, tons of yeast, dried blood,