1. From Urine to Ampoule: The Commodity Chain of a Hormone

Abstract

“Are you going to be a mother?” (Āpni ki mā hate calechen?) This question was inscribed on a billboard captured in a slightly blurred photograph that Mr. Velden was showing me in his living room in a small town in the Nether­ lands. It was part of a photo album depicting his visits to India. As a former repre­ sentative of a biochemical company, Mr. Velden had overseen a urine collection program in Kolkata. The billboard in the photograph had been erected close to the entrance of the company grounds in the outskirts of the city. Its inscrip­ tion invited pregnant women to help their infertile contemporaries by donating urine, which contains human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). The semipro­ cessed urine would then be transported by air to Oss, an industrial town in the Netherlands, where Mr. Velden’s company purified it to manufacture a phar­ maceutical that was sold internationally for infertility management. Tracing hCG’s “commodity chain” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986) between the 1960s and 1990s allows me to explore the alchemy of this hormone from a seemingly impotent waste product in Kolkata to a productive pharmaceutical commodity in the Netherlands.1 Or as Bruno Lunenfeld, a scientist who was instrumental in this field (see below), put it: hCG’s transformation from “urine into gold” (quoted in Livneh 2002). This alchemy was facilitated by promises of produc­ tivity that made the fertility of the urban poor in the global South available and valuable for reproductive medicine in the global North. In this chapter, I explore in detail the conditions of possibility that enabled the making of hCG, not only as a pharmaceutical but also as an important