The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt

pigs’ bristles and pork liver, chicken genitals, adrenal glands, horse ovaries, bovine follicular fluid and pituitary glands, powdered thyroid and placenta, bone marrow, mucous membranes, deep-frozen bovine pancreas—every other minute, it seemed, a new demand would come in for something the university lab needed straightway. All this took up a disproportionate amount of our employees’ time. It wasn’t just the effort required to track down the materials; every order tended to come with its own set of problems, since finding the best ways to conserve or convey the stuff was still a question of trial and error.
    But that was nothing compared with the way Levine treated us. He was never happy with our efforts; he was always criticizing our research methods, which he considered too slapdash or sloppy, or else he was unhappy with the promotion campaigns, or with our global marketing strategies, or our domestic or foreign outreach. We kept hearing that we weren’t running enough by him, that we weren’t heeding his directives, and that we were doing it all wrong. He wanted to be consulted on every trivial decision. He expected to receive an extensive account, or “business report,” as he called it, several times a week from us, to keep him abreast of everything, every single little detail, under consideration. His obnoxious meddling was starting to turn my initial gratitude into a growing sense of irritation. It wasn’t only me; everyone at Farmacom, all the workers putting their heart andsoul into making our firm succeed, felt that way. I went through several very capable directors in those years, people I’d have liked to keep on, who quit because they did not like being constantly second-guessed and treated like schoolchildren by the slave driver in Amsterdam. Never in my life have I known anyone who was as much of a control freak as Levine. Besides, it galled me that he had so little faith in me or my people, and that he hardly ever showed any appreciation of my success in getting his inventions sold as far afield as Indonesia, China, and South America.
    And yet I just couldn’t let the enormous potential of the pituitary gland slip through our fingers. Levine always knew how to whet my hunger, and time and time again, dependent as I was on his expertise, I ended up acceding to his demands.

16 …
    My talks with the priest turned into a tradition that I consciously kept going. The clergyman never brought up Rivka’s activities, probably because the casual, nonsectarian gatherings she organized were not conducted in the strict Catholic spirit he’d originally had in mind.
    And yet we did reach a certain measure of trust in our relationship. We met several times a year in the privacy of my office to discuss any problems with the workers, as well as any items of concern to his flock. Our conversations thus provided me with some useful insight into how our products were perceived by the Church. The insulin and the vitamins we manufactured could reasonably be expected to bring a certain amount of goodwill, but Preparation 288, which had recently come on the market, was being greeted with a great deal of mistrust. After all, the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and it was felt that deciding whether someone is fertile or not ought to be left up to our Maker; interfering in that domain was tantamount to blasphemy.
    One day the prelate told me he was sometimes called upon to counsel young brides or wives who were having trouble conceiving. If his advice did not result in a pregnancy, he wouldrecommend that they resign themselves to their fate. Another group suffered from the opposite affliction (and here the padre gave a rather sour smile): an overabundance of offspring. In that case he always tried to convince them that having a large brood was a blessing.
    As I listened to the priest’s hokum, it occurred to me that I did not have to rely solely on Levine—who was growing more demanding and arrogant by the