And for a time he was the president of a company on whose board he served for more than a decade: Istituto Farmacologico Serono.
LAND OF MILK AND HONEY
On December 8, 1953, Pius XII celebrated a new pontifical initiative: the opening of the Church’s inaugural Marian Year, aimed to “revive Catholic Faith and earnest devotion to the Mother of God” that the observant might “conform their lives to the image of the same Virgin.” The day was a triumph, but a few weeks later Pius XII suffered a debilitating attack of hiccups, vomiting, and nausea, for which he sought treatment from one Paul Niehans. (The Swiss surgeon and former Protestant minister practiced a controversial “rejuvenation treatment.” At the Clinique La Prairie on Lake Geneva, he injected the buttocks of his famous patients—rumored to include King George VI, Hedda Hopper, and Somerset Maugham—with the cells of fetal lambs and calves, delivered via cesarean section from the bodies of their freshly slaughtered mothers. For the pope, he made house calls.) By the power of God, Niehans’s ministrations, or pure luck, Pius XII recovered, only for his illness to fell him again in late 1954. His doctors and nephews arrived at his bedside, believing the end was near. But a week later the pope was asking for an egg. “Tell him he can have not only one egg, but two,” Time reported a gastrointestinal specialist telling his personal physician, “and have them flipped with Marsala, if he agrees.”
Conception, immaculate and otherwise, was much on Pius XII’s mind in the final years of his life. The Second World Congress on Fertility and Sterility—for which Lunenfeld’s own Professor de Watteville was one of 12 committee members—convened in Naples on May 18, 1956, for a nine-day summit: some 180 paper presentations, excursions to Amalfi and Pompeii, parties and fashion shows “to entertain the ladies,” and a special pilgrimage to Rome for an address from the pope.
“It is entirely true that your zeal to pursue research on marital infertility and the means to overcome it,” Pius XII told his listeners, as translated from the original Latin by Ronald L. Conte Jr., “engages high spiritual and ethical values, which should be taken into account.” He also said, “As regards artificial fertilization, not only is there need to be extremely reserved, but it must be absolutely excluded.”
A year later, Lunenfeld sat with Giulio Pacelli and Piero Donini, musing over the design needs of the special toilets they planned to install in the convent. They settled on a teardrop-shaped container akin to a small trash can, lined with a plastic bag. Throughout 1958, elderly nuns hiked up their habits, crouched over the containers, and voided their bladders. Serono employees collected the bags of urine and transported them to the Rome laboratory at Via Casilina, where technicians emptied them into metal tanks for processing. (During a 1930s Netherlands-based urine collection program, the people tasked with picking up donations were called pissmannekes, or “small piss men.”)
By 1959, Serono had harvested enough hMG to begin trials on infertile women. Lunenfeld, back in Israel, where he was working as a visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, wanted to treat his own hypothalamic amenorrheic patients with the drug, hoping to induce ovulation. The head of the hospital instructed Lunenfeld to inject himself with the substance. If he didn’t sustain any major side effects, they’d go forward with treatment.
Lunenfeld wasn’t particularly worried about what it might do to his own reproductive health. For one thing, he says, “I already had a son.” After the first injection, which an intern administered, Lunenfeld ran a high temperature, an effect of protein buildup in the solution. He and Donini increased purification methods and Lunenfeld continued to test and burn. On the fifth attempt, they were in the clear.
Lunenfeld never patented his findings, which could have made him a very rich man. He says his greatest compensation was the ability to bring the research material and lab equipment to Israel, a “gift” from Serono. For a short time there, he ran a urine collection program at local elderly care centers, where postmenopausal Israeli women occupied themselves by making baby clothes for the future children their urine would, ideally, help conceive.
In 1962, the first previously amenorrheic, infertile woman treated with hMG gave birth to a healthy baby. Two more women became pregnant, though they later miscarried. Still, this was an enormous success, and the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (today worth $16 billion), working in conjunction with Serono, registered the compound as Pergonal.
That year Lunenfeld became the head of the Institute of Endocrinology at Tel-Hashomer Hospital, now called Sheba Medical Center. Under his direction, the program grew exponentially, and the institution became a World Health Organization international reference center for fertility-promoting drugs. One former research assistant, Danny Lieberman, who performed data science in Lunenfeld’s lab in the mid-1970s, describes him as “a paper machine” whose 20-person team published something like 100 research papers in a single year—the entire physics department, by contrast, might produce five. But what particularly distinguished Lunenfeld, Lieberman remembers, was his broad, inquisitive interest in how science functioned within real human lives. He once happened upon the nonobservant Lunenfeld, kippah on head, poring over the Torah. Lunenfeld had been attending weekly study sessions with a rabbi in the hopes that he might learn how to better treat the some 20 percent of his patients who observed the Halakhah, which places constraints on sexual relations according to monthly menstrual cycles.
“I am sad about the suicide which Israel is committing,” Lunenfeld says today. During his conscription in the Israeli army, he served under Yitzhak Rabin, who would first become prime minister in 1974. The two remained friends. When a far-right extremist who opposed Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords assassinated the prime minister following what was widely seen as a peace rally, “for me, this was the end of Israel,” Lunenfeld says. “It was not what I fought for.”
The United States granted Lunenfeld a green card in 2001, and for much of the year he resides in Florida, returning to Tel Aviv to visit his children and grandchildren who still live there. His eldest son, Eitan, is the head of the IVF unit at the teaching hospital for Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
The Lunenfelds are part of a long lineage of fertility specialists in Israel, where the birth rate remains substantially higher than that of other industrialized countries. Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (2023), by Israel-born Tamar Novick, a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University of Berlin, traces a decades-long Judeo-Christian effort to promote fruitfulness in an unfamiliar climate—from Alsatian Christian missionary beekeepers, to dairy farmers during the British mandate, to Israeli scientists, including Lunenfeld—alongside the ways in which the knowledge and practices of the Palestinian people shaped European governance and settlement in the region.
Novick has a fascination with the science of excrement, plus a wry sense of humor; “Taking the Piss” and “Deep sh*t” are the titles of two recent presentations. Her current project is entitled Fountain of Knowledge: How Science Turned Urine Into Gold. In Milk and Honey, Novick writes that with the Industrial Revolution, “technology did not replace religion as a colonial device but instead was blended with aspirations to salvage the land,” becoming “crucial for seizing control over lands and people.” Religion, science, and politics intertwined. “Reproduction is such a fertile ground to think about this merging,” she tells me. “Those three elements are always at play.”
DEATH AND TAXES
During the fall of 1958, a depleted Pius XII retired to the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy See’s 135-acre summer palace situated high in the hills above Lake Albano, just southeast of Rome. In the palace courtyard, uniformed schoolchildren gathered to pray, and a knot of reporters set upon the few figures allowed in and out of the residence. On October 9, while lying in his single brass-frame bed, Pius took his final breaths. “A small crowd of people was present in the Pope’s bedroom when he died,” reported The Catholic Standard and Times the next day. Among them were princes Carlo, Marcantonio, and Giulio.
The death of a pope is always an upheaval, but in recent decades perhaps for none more personally than the three nephews, who learned firsthand the mortality of blood ties. Within months, according to one of several articles published by Der Spiegel that year regarding Vatican finances, the commander of the Noble Guard suggested that the Pacelli brothers take a hiatus from their duties within the unit, and the boards of multiple companies requested their resignations.
While abrupt, this was merely the apotheosis of public frustration that had been long brewing around the financial advantages afforded the three men through their relationship to the pope. And Giulio Pacelli was at the center of the ire, which dated back to his 1946 appointment as papal envoy and plenipotentiary minister of Costa Rica. The following year, the government had taken aim at tax evasion with an article in the Italian Constitution of 1947 decreeing that “all shall contribute to public expenditure in accordance with their means.” Pacelli, an Italian citizen, nonetheless hoped to make use of a technicality that exempted diplomatic representatives of foreign powers living in Italy from the tax. Members of the Vatican State Secretariat obligingly agreed. The Italian government did not.
For nearly a decade Rome and the Vatican argued the issue, during which time Pacelli’s fortune grew. In 1955, the Christian Democratic Party minister of finance broke with precedent and popular opinion, officially granting Pacelli immunity. But by the spring of 1958 (as the nuns diligently urinated), political parties had begun wielding the issue as anticlerical ammunition: “The Pope’s Nephews Don’t Pay Their Taxes” read the headline of L’Espresso, a left-wing weekly. Later that summer, the same magazine published a list of 11 Catholic laymen who managed the substantial spending power of the Vatican, which included the three Pacellis. Together, the brothers held positions on some 50 supervisory boards, and their personal combined net worth had dilated to an estimated 18 billion lire, 10 billion of which Giulio held primarily in foreign investments—the equivalent of about $170 million today.
