When nuns urine generated dozens of babies (with the blessing of Pope Pius XII)

It is not a miracle, nor Immaculate Conception. It is science – there were thousands of nuns to make the first treatments for infertility possible.

There are fun stories about the appearance of pharmaceutical products, but like the pergonal, which gave rise to various fertility medicines, there are few so original.

Scientist Piero Donini was the first, in the 1940s, to extract and purify the FSH and LH, the hormones that stimulate ovulation. Today we know that these hormones are in women’s urine, which is why pregnancy tests are done through urine.

But what many don’t know is that These hormones are more abundant in the body of women in menopause. This is because the body tries to stimulate its production when ovaries fail to produce various eggs.

A decade later, scientist Bruno Lunefeld departed from this assumption and decided to call his new medicine to combat infertility Pergonal. Only for him to exist were necessary Thousands of liters of urine of women entering menopause. But with one obligation: none of these women could, at all, be pregnant – otherwise they would contaminate the other samples.

“We are a medicine factory and not a urinol factory,” the pharmaceutical industry said at the time. But there were those who did not share this skepticism. This was the case of the Catholic Church leader himself… the Pixture XII.

Giulio Pacelli, an Italian aristocrat and the Pope’s nephew with knowledge in the pharmaceutical industry, explained the innovation to him, that the Supreme Pontiff welcomed, according to.

“My uncle, Pope Pio, He decided to help us and ask the nursing nuns to collect urine daily for a sacred causethen declared Pacelli.

And so it was: Lanenfeld started to create the pergonal through the nuns urine. And these had a lot of work ahead – About 10 nuns took 10 days to produce enough urine for treatment.

But these women were quite effective: the chances of being pregnant were… quite reduced. And in a joint effort, In just 2 years, the pergonal had already originated 20 pregnancies. The first child was born in 1962.

Later, the nuns were no longer required to produce fertility remedies – hormones were produced in the laboratory. But were it not for the blessing of Pius XII and the clerical effort, it would have been difficult to test Linefeld’s medicine.

At this moment of history, science and religion have held hands to give rise to a true miracle of multiplication.