The Hormone Factory (2 page)

Without tooting my own horn, I can safely say that in this nation of wusses, this swamp pit of small-minded burghers who look down their noses at dreamers, I was one of the first to realize that commerce needs science, and vice versa. To run a successful meatpacking operation is one thing: it takes skill and business savvy. But to get further ahead, you have to have guts; you have to use your head and dream big. My father plucked my brother and me from school and got us started in the meat business. He wouldn’t let us go to university, and the thought of it still makes me fume. Shit, how I’d have loved to be allowed to study—I’d have chosen chemistry, naturally, which I consider the most fascinating of all subjects. There’s nothing finer than knowing how to analyze and then purify some substance, to synthesize the compounds it consists of, and so to unravel nature’s mysteries. To contribute to man’s mastery over matter, that was my burning ambition as a young man. But it was out of the question. I had to join the firm.

“You are a De Paauw,” said my father, “and De Paauws don’t have time for egghead tomfoolery. You can’t live off your brains; brains won’t bring in a cent—unless you’re making headcheese or sausage, of course. Butchering, meat production, that’s what’s in our blood, we’ve never done aught else, and oughtn’t to aspire to anything more either. There’s no other meatpacker in these parts that’s got a more sterling reputation than ours.”

And although I’m no pushover, I never was able to stand up to my father. I was afraid of him, as were most people. You should have seen Aaron—he’d start shaking whenever my
father called for him. He’d begin to stutter, which is why he never earned my father’s respect, which did eventually come to me. Bringing Aaron into the firm was a farce. My brother was such a softy that he tended to screw up every transaction. But he could not, would not, disappoint my father, so he stayed on, a stone around our necks, while never, not even for a single day, being happy there. Lived only for others his entire life, did what was expected of him, his loyalty aimed at all mankind. And right when he finally has a chance to start over—he gets trampled to death under the great scumbag’s storm-trooper boots. No idea why my brother keeps popping up in my mind. Haven’t thought much about him in years. Best that way too. Crying over spilled milk doesn’t get you anywhere. What’s done is done, there’s nothing you can do about death’s unpredictable ways.

• • •

While we were trainees in our father’s business, I kept a low profile, ostensibly meek and subservient, like Aaron. Meanwhile I was eagerly taking in everything that went on, both within the firm and outside, for as I’ve often said, an inward-looking company will miss the boat. Navel-gazing has never been a productive tactic in business. To get somewhere you have to dare to break new ground, you have to dare to dream. And to stick your neck out; if you don’t take any risks you’re never going to get off the ground.

When my father passed away and at age twenty-seven I took over as head of the firm, with Aaron (heaven help us!) as my deputy, I immediately swung into action.

It was the early nineteen-twenties, and we were processing two thousand pigs and three-fifty head of cattle a day. We produced sausages, hams, and smoked meats, as well as bacon and
gammon for the English market. Blood and bone meal went into fertilizer; we had a refinery for fats and oils and, last but not least, a soap factory. The hog bristles were used to manufacture brushes. We extracted value from every scrap of animal corpse, from head to hoof. Except for those dratted organs. There was nothing you could do with them. No one could give me a reason why every animal was stuffed to the gills with those weird gummy parts. What damn use were they? Darwin had taught me that everything on earth that’s alive exists for a reason, or it would have become obsolete or extinct long ago. But in our predominantly Roman Catholic region, that sort of reasoning would not have gone down very well. “After all, the Good Lord never created anything for nothing,” I’d occasionally proclaim, to justify my interest in discovering the hidden uses of organs.

My hunch was confirmed by a breakthrough then being made in the pharmaceutical field. Two Canadians—a physician and one of his students (I’m telling you, not even an experienced scientist; no, a mere medical student)—had succeeded in isolating a substance in the pancreas, insulin, which was found capable of combating diabetes, a disease commonly resulting in a fatal coma. This substance was extracted from the pancreas, which got dumped by the ton on our plant’s refuse heap each and every day. What a game changer that was. When I heard about it, I walked outside and just stood there staring at the colossal mountain of offal in our factory yard. Who’d have thought that stinking pile contained unsuspected riches, like the copper ore trapped in rock deep in the earth’s crust, or the gold in the mud of a riverbed? My instinct was telling me that there, within that putrid waste, a hidden treasure lay buried, a golden tomorrow. All we had to do was plumb the secrets of the animal organs, and beat the world’s many other treasure hunters
to it. There, standing at the foot of that mountain of slime, I cursed my father’s shortsightedness. If only he hadn’t prevented me from learning to ferret out the secrets of those bloody body parts myself!

We had no time to lose, and I, Mordechai de Paauw, Motke to my friends, was determined to win the race. It was my destiny, I was sure of it.

But I had to find someone, a researcher, an ambitious, dedicated man of science, someone prepared to go into partnership with me and, under the banner of the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co., to start experimenting PDQ.

It didn’t take long for me to find him. Not out here in the flipping sticks, of course, this backwater of hayseeds and potato diggers. Not out here in this lawless hole where history had decided to dump our
mishpocha
as a sick kind of joke. We happened to live in the most crooked town in the nation; you wouldn’t find a meaner nest of sharks anywhere. There was no point looking for a sharp-witted scientist around here, certainly not the kind of original, independent thinker I needed.

The man with whom I wound up starting the firm that was to grow into the first multinational enterprise in this poky, waterlogged, small-minded country lived in Amsterdam. A Prussian cosmopolite, which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but the truth is sometimes complicated; a man at least as sharp as I was, perhaps even smarter. I’m a practical man, creative and full of energy. This professor shared those same traits and was, moreover, upright, reliable, distinguished, and the only one in this country capable of realizing my dreams. His name was Rafaël Levine.

4 …

Levine was a both realist
and
an idealist. Idealism is something a businessman can’t afford, but as a man of science, it had helped him go far. He was born in Germany, but being a Jew, he couldn’t find suitable employment in his own country. Germany had given rise to the most brilliant musicians, writers, and scientists, it was our most important foreign market, and yet, instinctively, I had never trusted the Germans, no matter how civilized they might appear to be. The fact that Rafaël was a Jew was a point in his favor, of course, but still, I was on my guard. I’d always had a foreboding, long before the shit hit the fan, that caution was in order when dealing with a people who, like a brainless mob, showed themselves ready to blindly follow the greatest villain history has ever seen.

Levine seduced me with his intelligence, his sense of responsibility, his indomitable drive, and his business acumen. He had a medical degree and had been teaching at a northern Dutch university since 1912. Yet when the First World War broke out, he had felt obliged to serve his fatherland. A man of honor, he had volunteered as a physician in the Imperial Army and was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, for his loyal service. In the nineteen-twenties he was appointed chairman of the
pharmacology department at the University of Amsterdam, where he presided over his own research institute.

We had dinner together in the spring of 1923, joined by my brother, Aaron, sitting there like a sack of potatoes as usual, in Die Port van Cleve, a restaurant in the center of Amsterdam named after a town in Germany. The very choice of restaurant spoke to Levine’s continued attachment to the land of his birth, even though that land had seen fit to spurn this learned man’s erudition.

Levine’s command of the Dutch language was so poor that people always begged him to speak in his mother tongue, since he was impossible to understand otherwise. He was an imposing gentleman of near middle age, with a striking, aristocratic bearing. His black hair, showing singularly little gray, was just starting to recede. Behind his round spectacles his dark, probing eyes seemed to pierce right through you. Adorning his upper lip was a fashionable little mustache which ten years later would acquire an unfortunate association with the fiend who was to have such a dire effect on our lives. I approached him with a healthy dose of suspicion at first. And indeed, there was that confounded accent of his, the incomprehensible syntax, Germanisms galore, but also, thank God, a sense of humor. During the first course, a beet and herring salad, he kept throwing his career accomplishments in my face, hitting the first and only raw nerve of my young life. Having only three years of high school under my belt was my sore spot, and he found it.

“I am in a noble profession,” he declared; “nothing can compare with being chairman of the department of pharmacology at the University of Amsterdam, this beautiful city.”

His words cut me to the quick. I was a rookie, just starting out, untested and able to call myself the boss only on account
of my father’s untimely death. I didn’t yet have any kind of record to boast of, and was sensitive about my youth. I felt it was a strike against me; I was nothing but a green provincial salesman next to this egghead, who was obviously enjoying rubbing my nose in his own stellar achievements. Aaron sipped his wine and gazed at me, sensitive as he was to what riled me.

When Levine brought up the subject of insulin’s discovery by that dratted pair of Canadians, it was with a tone of envy that I recognized. What he wouldn’t have given to score that breakthrough himself! As the waiter served us platters of blood sausage, rillettes of braised baby back ribs in salsify cream, and a Jerusalem artichoke and giant-leaf tart floating in a “kitchen maid’s tears” salsify broth, Levine proclaimed that he was confident he could be the first to make the newly discovered insulin commercially available on an industrial scale.

“I have the formula,” he said, unable to suppress a triumphant grin. “I could be the first in the world to succeed in standardizing the product. To isolate the insulin from the pancreas is one thing. But for it to be made into medicine and save lives, it must be standardized. It can only be mass-produced if it’s standardized. If I succeed, I’ll be able to obtain an exclusive license for the manufacture and sale of insulin in the Netherlands; throughout Europe, in fact.”

Right then and there he had me—this was exactly the man I needed. He droned on, and I greedily drank in every word of his monologue.

“However,” Levine went on, “as an academic, I don’t possess the means to undertake this research on an independent basis. I do have my own institute, but it is sadly lacking in every way. My laboratory is poorly equipped, the apparatus is outdated,
and I don’t have enough chemists or pharmacologists on my team of the caliber required to get a head start on this. We are up against the foremost scientists in the world; it’s a race against time, which will only be won with a team of first-rate people and a state-of-the-art research institute.”

Levine regarded me gravely, while Aaron blankly watched the waiter filling up his glass. Aaron doesn’t much care for people who are very sure of themselves. I do. It was time to put my offer on the table.

“Professor Levine,” I said, “I am your inferior both in years and in experience, and yet, as I listen to you, it’s as if you are putting my own thoughts into words. It’s fate: we are destined to work together on this grand undertaking. I am in a position to give you that research institute. A laboratory, a budget for personnel and research, and all the organ meat you’ll ever want. I will give you carte blanche, as long as you give me your word you’ll make the insulin ready for mass production as soon as possible. Insulin produced and marketed on a commercial scale, as a joint venture of business and science—it’s never been done before. And once that’s done, we can move on to the next project. I’ll want you to work on isolating as many new substances from these organs as you can, anything that will result in commercially viable medicinal products.”

By the time dessert was served, the general outline of our future partnership was already jotted down on the back of Levine’s cigar box: a new company joining together our respective strengths. And by the time we’d enjoyed our coffees, an exceptional brandy, and one of Levine’s exquisite Cuban cigars, parting with the promise to meet again in a few days to finalize the deal, the fellow had already come up with the perfect name for our new institute: Farmacom. A name that said it all:
a pharma-commercial partnership to produce medicines that hadn’t yet been invented.

The fledgling concern that was to expand into one of the world’s first multinational companies was conceived in an Amsterdam dining establishment with a German name, born of the union of an intellectual giant and a cutthroat businessman.

5 …

Just as I was preparing to go to the partnership agreement meeting with Levine a few days later, Aaron walked into my office. He was chewing on his pencil, as usual: a nervous habit he never managed to kick and had probably acquired back when his stuttering was so bad that it ruled out normal conversation. That was one of the reasons my father had named me his successor in his will, dooming Aaron to live forever in my shadow. Strangely enough, it hadn’t seemed to bother him at the time.

“Motke,” Aaron said, lowering himself lethargically onto the armrest of the chair facing my desk, “you know, don’t you, that with all the promises you’ve made to the guy, you have seriously undermined your negotiating position?”