The story

In 1949 Piero Donini at the Serono Institute in Rome extracted gonadotropins from the urine of post-menopausal women and named the product Pergonal. In the late 1950s Bruno Lunenfeld, working between Geneva, Rome and Israel, purified it for people, and in 1962 in Israel the first baby was born after HMG treatment. Serono gathered the urine from convents of retired nuns in Italy to supply it. HMG then became the backbone of fertility medicine worldwide, and in Russia and Eastern Europe menotropins remain a standard tool to restart sperm production in men with low pituitary output, given with hCG for about three months.