On a frigid day in Copenhagen when Erik Hageman was 2 years old, he tripped over his wooden clogs. His face smashed into the floor. In the emergency room, a surgeon repaired his tongue, which had split, but in the months while he was recuperating he shrieked nonstop for water. His urine turned sticky and sweet. The doctor diagnosed diabetes, type 1, the autoimmune condition in which the body attacks its own pancreas.
This was 1942. The Nazis occupied Denmark and eugenics was their first medical principle. Trauma like Erik’s fall, some suggested, activated diabetes, and the bloodline of the diabetic was poisoned. Three short weeks of neglect, the doctor promised Hageman’s parents, and their little son would perish of ketoacidosis or starvation. “The best you can do is do nothing,” the doctor said.
Still, Hageman’s parents felt—and this was rebellious, given the master-race ideology that crackled through the Nazi Weltanschauung—that their boy deserved to live. When Hageman’s father, a custodian at a sports college, told his coworkers his son had diabetes, one of them knew a guy.
Hans Christian Hagedorn, short-tempered physician. Wild tufts of hair. At Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium just outside of Copenhagen, he was refining insulin from the pancreases of cows and pigs to make it work better for humans. During a long period under Hagedorn’s care, Erik Hageman started to get twice-daily injections of a fine precipitate of protamine insulin, a breakthrough formulation that prolonged insulin’s effects in the body. Neutral Protamine Hagedorn is still on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. By the time he was 5, Hageman was injecting himself with a wide-gauge needle as broad as—he pantomimed to me, in a kind of diabetic fish story—a tree trunk.
At 85, Erik Hageman is a dapper grandfather of surpassing warmth, compact like a tap dancer. He’s one of the longest-living diabetics in Denmark. We spent an afternoon together in a modernist mansion in Copenhagen called Domus Hagedorn, which is owned by Novo Nordisk, the Danish firm that grew from Hagedorn’s lab. “Hagedorn was rather crazy,” Hageman told me. But without the doctor’s care, he explained, “I’d be blind and I’d have to cut off my legs and have kidney failure.” The now-global company makes half the insulin in the world. Yet today it’s rich and famous for producing Ozempic, the megahit semaglutide drug.
Just before visiting Erik Hageman, I met Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, who has presided over the company’s epochal metamorphosis, at the company’s headquarters in Bagsværd, a suburb of Copenhagen. The building’s design, with its giant helix-like indoor spiral staircase, is inspired by insulin—the molecule, the miracle. In a conference room flooded with light, Jørgensen spoke fondly of Hageman, the company’s poster child. Novo’s executives had clearly presented Hageman to convince me that the company’s greatest achievement is not its stratospheric valuation but its century-long record of saving lives with insulin.
But at Novo these days, semaglutide blocks out the sun. Ozempic was the world’s second-highest-selling drug in 2024. It works extremely well for type 2 diabetes, a non-autoimmune disorder in which the body makes poor use of insulin. And one effect of semaglutide, as we all know now, has been the box-office draw from day one: appetite suppression. The drugs that contain it—especially Ozempic and its more powerful sister Wegovy—have transformed Novo into a global slimming juggernaut. In 2023, the company surpassed Parisian luxury brand LVMH to become the richest company in all of Europe, hitting the ludicrously high market cap of $424 billion. In 2024, Novo took a punch in the face, but it ended the year still richer by market cap than Bank of America, Coca-Cola, and Toyota.
Beyond the dazzling before-and-afters, though, Jørgensen is looking at a tricky future, parts of which, he told me, “scare the hell” out of him.
Though Novo has as its controlling shareholder the largest altruistic foundation in the world, it has to act coldly and tactically, like an oil or defense company. The demanding semaglutide business has become a mean ouroboros: the insatiable market, exorbitant manufacturing costs, competition from Eli Lilly, pricing pressure from governments, and the private-insurance dystopia in the US—by far Novo’s biggest market, where some 15 million people now take semaglutide. At the same time is the moral crux. Semaglutide alone almost never works for the 8.4 million type 1 diabetics around the world. What keeps Jørgensen up at night is his fear that, the way drug manufacturing and American health care companies and global markets work, his company might not be able to do right by its original patients. These are the non-Hollywood patients—the ones who, like Eric Hageman, can’t live without insulin.
For its first 75 years, Novo was indispensable but unknown, a producer of insulin, an anonymous commodity. In 1991 the obscurity started to lift. That year, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, a Danish chemical engineer, was seeking a treatment specifically for type 2 diabetes, which accounts for as much as 95 percent of all cases of the disease. Over the next 18 years, she led a Novo team in developing an exquisitely cool medicine for type 2 called liraglutide. Liraglutide is an analogue of a human hormone called GLP-1, for glucagon-like peptide-1. After humans eat, we very, very briefly secrete GLP-1 in the brain stem and the gut.
GLP-1 can be seen as a tranquilizer for the flesh, a soother of deep and primitive longings. GLP-1 says to the body: peace. Food is available. But GLP-1 in its natural form only murmurs these soothing blandishments for a minute or two. It affords the hungry soul a glimpse of OK-ness, but a fleeting one.
The challenge for Knudsen was to build a dupe of GLP-1 that would persist, a GLP-1 that would let a patient feel blood-sugar equanimity longer. Knudsen pulled this off by snapping a fatty acid onto a precise spot on a chain of amino acids. It’s incomprehensibly more complex than that, but eureka anyway: Knudsen had something that acted like our natural GLP-1 hormone but stayed in the system for a full day.
Liraglutide was approved in the US for type 2 diabetes in 2010 and for weight loss in 2014. But a daily injection could put patients off. So Novo assembled a new team of researchers that included Jesper Lau, a peptide and protein engineer, who invented semaglutide, from the French semaine, for “week.” Semaglutide suffuses the body and brain for seven days.
A weeklong reprieve from blood sugar turbulence, and from the ravenousness that defines modern existence. A single shot and you feel like you’ve just eaten always. In 2018, the world learned Novo Nordisk’s name when the company released semaglutide as Ozempic. Novo even created a jingle. Oh oh oh Ozempic!
The cheers for semaglutide would have drowned out the cheers for insulin a hundred years ago. Yes, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea—these are not uncommon side effects. And some rare but terrifying ones like possible blindness have been identified. But semaglutide is generally, as they say, “well tolerated.” True believers see a panacea: a treatment for alcoholism, heart disease, polycystic ovary syndrome, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, sleep apnea, liver disease, and a newly identified mental obsession with eating and dieting known as “food noise,” which is especially common in the US.
Most Danes have never even heard the Ozempic jingle. Like nearly every country on earth except the United States and New Zealand, Denmark prohibits advertising prescription pharmaceuticals to consumers. With its weight-loss fetish and direct-to-consumer marketing, the US was clearly Novo’s Troy, primed to be sacked. Under CEO Jørgensen, Novo hired media giant Wavemaker, whose clients include L’Oréal and Tiffany. Novo began spending reportedly close to $200 million a year flogging semaglutide. Americans were soon hooked on the jingle, the relief, and the compliments.
To make money stateside means navigating through the dark woods of both America’s health care quagmire and its thorny diet culture. One of the biggest tasks for Novo was to throw off the impression that semaglutide is a vanity drug. Styling it like insulin, a sober injection for a disease, rather than like speed, a candy-colored pill for weight loss, was the only way to get it covered by fickle American insurance companies. And if semaglutide could be covered, especially while under patent, it would be exponentially more bankable.
Thus, Novo Nordisk joined the ongoing effort to fire-hose the world with the word obesity, not to refer to body size but to a metabolic disease. By the time Wegovy—specifically for weight loss, with a dosage of semaglutide 2.4 times higher than the Ozempic dosage—was approved in 2021, obesity was in full swing as its own affliction, and semaglutide swooped in as the cure.
Not long after, the FDA handed Novo yet another victory when it approved Wegovy to “reduce the risk of serious heart problems” in heavier-weight people. The agency added that 70 percent of American adults fall into this category.
in spite of the market ruckus about semaglutide, insulin still seemed like the favorite child at Novo’s headquarters. Engineered human insulin is a pharmaceutical jewel, a priceless DNA sequence rigged up in 1978 and sometimes described as biotech’s first “golden molecule.” It’s also a so-called biologic. Biologics are medicines derived from big, complex, living molecules: bacteria, blood, yeast, viruses, and animal and plant matter. They are costly and complex to create.
Insulin at Novo is made from baker’s yeast, a microorganism with a relatively high biomass that’s chock full of protein, essential amino acids, and minerals. It’s an ideal workshop for a DNA tinkerer. At the same time, built molecules, the ones like insulin that express themselves in yeast, are maddeningly idiosyncratic.
Monika Nøhr Løvgreen, a research scientist I spoke to in her lab at Novo, told me her love affair with engineered molecules can get tumultuous. “It’s not enough for a molecule to give me the biology I need. I need something I can inject without getting red or itchy, that doesn’t degrade when I store it, that’s well behaved in the solution.” Løvgreen described some molecules as “prima donnas” while others are well behaved, elegant, and even queenly.
In the insulin and semaglutide labs, engineering a molecule correctly is everything, Brian Vandahl, Novo’s head of global research technology, told me. That’s where scientists create “the single cell that starts the whole release culture, that lives in those big tanks.” From Bagsværd, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the company’s giant drug-manufacturing facilities.
Whether for insulin or other biologics, it’s not cheap to grow, ferment, and purify living cells. (Though it is made in a similar way as insulin, the engineered protein in semaglutide contains fewer than 40 amino acids, so the FDA classifies it as a small-molecule drug, rather than a biologic.) Like pets or people or gardens, microorganisms need to be lovingly cared for, which requires patience, sugar, climate control, and constant cleaning with substances that don’t kill microorganisms. In West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Novo has a secretive biologics facility, one local referred to the plant as “the place where they teach fleas to sing and dance.”
By contrast, blockbuster tablets like Prozac, Viagra, Oxycontin, Tylenol, Lipitor are, relatively, a piece of cake—and cheaper to make. They’re usually derived from nonliving molecules with lower biomass, mostly chemical compounds. Hardy and inanimate, these chemicals don’t need to be managed with kid gloves. “It’s easier to control chemistry,” Vandahl said. “But I’m more fascinated by biology.”
Now that Novo is responsible for the blockbuster semaglutide drugs and half the world’s insulin, it is putting tens of billions of dollars into expanding its production facilities. Each one costs $2 or $3 billion and takes five years to bring online—half of the time to build, the other half testing the machinery.
Last year the company broke ground on a vast new manufacturing facility in the seaport town of Kalundborg, Denmark, on the island of Zealand. This biotech metropolis produces a range of active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, from living cells, including insulin and semaglutide. “Look for Dubai,” one Novo employee told me, when describing how to spot the place.
The town is indeed a misty forest of harbor cranes and construction dust. I wanted most of all to see the vats of high-spirited yeast. Michael Hallgren, the senior vice president of API manufacturing, gave me a tour. After we gowned up, he let me hold a small vial with molasses-colored fluid; this was the showpiece cell engineered in the lab. They wouldn’t tell me if it contained the molecule for insulin or semaglutide. But the rich appearance of the fluid, the intense specialness—I recognized it. “A sourdough starter?” I asked after a beat.
“Yes,” he said. Strolling through the factories, which Hallgren, at nearly 7 feet, seemed to cross in a single bound, what I noticed most was silo-sized mixing bowls. Inside them, something that looked like cake batter bubbled. It was comforting how strongly the facilities smelled like bread, like beer—alive and fizzy. “And, when that starter grows,” Hallgren told me, “It’s enough to treat 100 million diabetics for one year.”
Novo Nordisk employs around 30,000 people in Denmark, with about 5,000 in Kalundborg alone. One bright-eyed young employee, who traveled from the Philippines to Kalundborg to work at the company, has a job validating machinery. (“I have an aunt who has diabetes and uses our product,” she told me.) With some $8.5 billion invested in expanding the plant here, hundreds more are expected to come. Not long after I left Denmark, Novo announced it was building yet another facility—in Odense, for $1.2 billion. A Copenhagen politician even said that he anticipates an American brain drain of scientists to Denmark during Trump’s second term.
Novo also has plants devoted to making its drugs in Brazil, China, France, Algeria, Iran, and the US. In December, it acquired Catalent, a global development and manufacturing company headquartered in New Jersey, for $11.7 billion.
But Novo’s impact on Denmark is absolute. The country is home to fewer than 6 million people, and somehow the company’s recent triumphs have driven its GDP up ahead of Egypt, which has a population of 112.7 million. The company pays in taxes what any self-respecting American capitalist would consider confiscatory: $3.6 billion globally in income taxes in 2023, $2.3 billion of that to Denmark. Corporate tax revenue in Kalundborg has shot up 10-fold since 2010. “Big shoutout to overweight Americans for keeping my mortgage low,” a Danish economist tweeted in 2023.
since word of semaglutide’s slimming effects hit the diet-culture rialto, people have been clamoring for it. In 2022, the FDA listed semaglutide drugs as in shortage. People who couldn’t wait for the real thing began to turn to specialized pharmacies that cook up Ozempic knock-offs as if it were bathtub gin, sometimes with tragic results.
Meanwhile, just as Novo was making the market, Indiana-based Eli Lilly rolled out its own GLP-1 drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound. With an American company invading Novo’s market, some warned that Denmark now faced the so-called “Nokia risk”—the fate that befell Finland in the aughts when it predicated its entire economy on Nokia and its pioneering smartphone, only to get wiped out when Apple introduced the iPhone.
The US government too has absorbed the size of the GLP-1 phenomenon. At the end of 2024, the Biden administration proposed a rule that would have Medicare and Medicaid cover semaglutide for weight loss. “It’s a game changer for Americans who can’t afford these drugs otherwise,” Xavier Becerra, the head of Health and Human Services, said.
Sure, the new administration will likely kibosh this. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump has nominated to run health policy, has waffled on Ozempic, once claiming that obesity and even diabetes can be cured with discipline and diet. (Novo Nordisk, he told Fox News, is “counting on selling it to Americans because we are so stupid and so addicted to drugs.”) But Americans are unlikely to go without. At Christmas, Elon Musk, looking gaunt, styled himself as “Ozempic Santa.”
nothing matters more to Novo than doing brisk and brisker business in the US. This requires that the company do regular battle with the same demon even the lowliest American confronts: health care runarounds.
On September 29, 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders grilled Lars Jørgensen at a hearing on the price of Ozempic and Wegovy. Bernie found the price of patent-protected semaglutide too damn high, and he seemed to be champing at the bit for a set piece in which he’d slay his very own Big Tobacco CEO. Comparing Ozempic’s price in Germany ($59) to its US price (some $600 after rebates), Sanders asked Jørgensen, “From a moral perspective, does it bother you that keeping the price of Ozempic and Wegovy so high could lead to the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans?”
Jørgensen seemed to hedge. Novo now pays a reported $5 million a year to lobbyists to get lawmakers on its side; still he had volunteered to testify. He wanted, he told me, to educate the lawmakers. In a calm and steely voice, he explained how costly it is to make biologics. He didn’t give Sanders the fireworks the senator craved. Instead, he directed the committee’s attention to pharmacy benefit managers.
PBMs. The worst. They’re the despised outfits like CVS Caremark that administer drugs for health plans, negotiate for insurance companies, and, most notably, maintain the lists of drugs covered by insurance.
Though many of us learned about PBMs only after the December assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, which is affiliated with a giant PBM, Jørgensen has called these middlemen the real enemy for a long time. Facing down Sanders, he spelled out one of the most excruciating paradoxes of American health care. PBMs make their money from insurance premiums, but they also get money from drugmakers in the form of rebates. Usually, the more expensive a medication is, the higher its rebate. If a drug company like Novo drops the price of its drugs too low, the PBMs, afraid to miss their cut, often stop covering them altogether.
Take Levemir. As Novo Nordisk rode $18.5 billion high on semaglutide profits, the company announced it would discontinue one of its insulin products. Levemir was set to vanish entirely on December 31, 2024. Patients were stunned. Though Levemir had lost its luster as a first-line treatment, 200,000 people worldwide still used it. The long-acting insulin drug, which metabolizes more quickly than other types of insulin, works especially well for young, pregnant, or highly active type 1 diabetics. Novo aimed to soothe anxiety by pointing out that it offers a range of other products for these patients.
Jørgensen told the committee, “We lowered the list price in the US by 65 percent, just to realize that after we dropped the price of Levemir, the PBMs dropped coverage.” Novo discontinued the drug. Of course, the company bears some responsibility for the price of its biologics. But as Senator Tim Kaine pointed out at the hearing, Novo and PBMs are apples and oranges. Novo “makes life-saving treatments,” he said, while PBMs essentially exist to skim.
Novo Nordisk, with its Danish earnestness, really seems to believe it could confound the paradigm of capitalist rapacity. While it is publicly owned and traded, its controlling shareholder is still the Novo Nordisk Foundation, cofounded by Hans Christian Hagedorn in the 1920s to use profits from insulin sales to research diabetes. Its mandate has expanded, and it has spent billions to address societal and climate crises. Most recently, the foundation, which is more than twice the size of the Gates Foundation, allocated $1.3 billion of its $167 billion endowment to research and humanitarian grants.
At the hearing, Sanders, the old lefty, stopped his hammering of Jørgensen to praise Danish decency. “As you may know, look, I’m a great respecter of the people of Denmark. I think you have a social system which is very progressive.” About Novo specifically, he said, “All we are saying, Mr. Jørgensen, is: Treat the American people the same way you treat people all over the world.”
The market, as usual, had a mind of its own. It focus was not on diabetes: Emily Field, a pharma analyst at Barclays, predicted that weight-loss drugs like Wegovy would be “the biggest pharmaceutical class ever” and worth $200 billion in a decade. She added that insulin is of “decreasing financial importance” to Novo Nordisk.
This may have been exciting to investors, but it wasn’t what any diabetes patient wanted to hear. Already Novo was under so much pressure to manufacture pens for obesity and type-2 diabetes patients that it had scaled back making insulin pens in South Africa. Without those pens, type 1 diabetics had to resort to cumbersome vials. (A spokesperson at the time said Novo was phasing out certain products to address “capacity constraints.”)
“This is completely unacceptable,” Helen Bygrave, of Doctors Without Borders, told me. “More lucrative medicines in the same pen devices—GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy—are being sold by Novo at an unprecedented rate in high-income countries. This has clearly diverted manufacturing capacity of pens to garner billions in profits at the cost of people living with diabetes.”
Faced with having to ramp up production, feed lobbying and marketing divisions, and meet its earning projections, Novo Nordisk—the foundation-run, conscience-stricken insulin company—seemed, from the outside, to be acting less like a research hospital and more like a corporation that had hit the heel of hockey-stick growth.
it was an unexpectedly sunny day in mid November when I met Jørgensen at Novo headquarters. The CEO, Novo’s fifth in 100 years, is a tall, handsome man with a long stride and a soft voice. After a successful knee surgery last year, he’s back to kayaking, playing tennis, and riding his bike through the Danish countryside. The employees at Novo had warned me that Jørgensen is introverted, and I expected reticence from him or even evasion. This was wrong.
I asked him straightaway about fat.
“My own personal journey is one of being guilty of stigmatizing people with overweight, obesity,” Jørgensen said. “I was coming from an original thought of ‘OK, that’s probably because you eat too much, and you are not active enough.’”
That meme-weary phrase, personal journey—Jørgensen, to my surprise, seemed to mean it. “I went from ‘If you just did better, you would have changed your weight and you’ll be fine’ to understanding that people are different. There’s a genetic dimension, there’s where you live, your financial position, your socioeconomic position, the culture you live and work in. It’s a bit too simple to look at it as a self-inflicted condition.”
He went on. “People do not like to be stigmatized.” He seemed to grapple with Novo’s role in American diet culture. “But even saying it’s a disease is, in a way, stigmatizing people. I also understand that body-mass index is not a good way to diagnose people.”
What was this? His phrasing sounded distantly familiar. But not like a CEO. He sounded almost like a social worker. Diabetics, of course, deserve such high-touch treatment. But perhaps the more annoying patients do too—the ones panicked about food and their body’s appearance and desperate to lose 25 pounds.
When I brought up insulin, Jørgensen turned militant. “Insulin is still a very important market for us,” he said. “We are committed to the field. It’s not something that’s growing like type 2 diabetes or obesity, but this is where it all started. We’ll never walk away from people with type 1 diabetes. We owe that to them. We don’t see it as a burden.”
What worries him is that competing companies are developing biosimilars for insulin that are cheaper to produce than the insulin at Novo. Ah, now we have some garden-variety greed, I thought.
But it’s more complex than that. The scenario Jørgensen sketched out for me presented a migraine of catch-22s. “I worry about the future of a market that’s becoming more commoditized,” he said. “If other companies make biosimilar insulins, and if countries shift to that product, we’d have to start using our capacity for other drugs.”
He continued: “If patients end up relying on them, and those companies don’t have the history and know-how to make a low-margin product, and we have moved our capacity elsewhere, there’s a shortage of insulin. Who ends up supplying patients, and what kind of commitment do they have?” He paused. Then he expressed another anxiety. I’d expected Jørgensen to strut like a man on top of the world. His troubles were troubling.
“It worries me that policymakers don’t understand the market. We at Novo Nordisk don’t decide what patients pay. The reality is that, for us, the price of insulin—what we get—has gone down very rapidly. We have support programs for those who cannot afford our products or do not have insurance.” Novo’s Patient Assistance Program indeed gives away Ozempic and insulin to eligible Americans who earn anywhere up to four times the poverty line.
“The only place where we give medicine away like this is the refugee camps, war zones, and the US,” Jørgensen said.
He then returned to his anger at health care companies. In the US, he says, for every dollar of revenue Novo gets from selling insulin, it gives 74 cents to PBMs, wholesalers, and insurance companies. Whenever PBMs and others hike prices to get their cut, Jørgensen told me, policymakers insist Novo should lower its costs. “If this persists, the economics around insulin could be no longer viable. That scares the hell out of me.”
So it’s not just that Jørgensen, as a CEO, fears competition from cheaper drugs. It’s that, at any moment, Novo Nordisk could become stretched so thin by market forces that it couldn’t serve all of its patients. Say, for instance, other pharma companies get a piece of the insulin market with their cheaper biosimilars, and Novo cedes some of the insulin business. Then the new entrants, lacking a long-standing duty to serve diabetics and fed up with the drug’s low margins, stop making it. By then Novo’s insulin capacity would be devoted to other medicine. There could be an insulin shortage. Diabetics could die.
I thought of the type 1 diabetics I know and love, with their insulin pumps, pens, glucose monitors, and tracking apps. I thought of their moments of rocky blood sugar—the shakes, sweating, blurred vision, anxiety. Now I was scared. How could Novo ensure that it’s at least cost-effective to supply half of all the insulin for type 1 diabetics around the world?
“Our history, our purpose, our values come into play,” Jørgensen said.
“But of course, we also have shareholders … ” He trailed off. It seemed I’d never get an answer. Or maybe there just isn’t one.
almost as if to justify his fears, bad news hit Novo Nordisk at the very end of 2024. On December 4, Lilly released—and widely promoted—a study showing that people lose 20 percent of their body weight with Zepbound and a mere 14 percent with Wegovy. With this, the market contracted to a single data point: percentage of body mass shed. Forget metabolic disease. Like glossy magazines at the checkout counter, stock analysts were now fixated on dress sizes and beach bodies.
Then, on December 20, Zepbound was approved to treat sleep apnea, the first GLP-1 to win this approval. The same week, Novo unveiled a study that—in an upside-down way—was deemed to be a grave disappointment. Patients who had taken Novo’s new CagriSema, a shot that combines semaglutide with an analog of another hormone, had slimmed down by 22.7 percent. That sounds like a boatload. And it was more than the Zepbounders lost. But Novo had projected the patients would shrink a full quarter in size—25 percent, not 22.7. Investors wailed, and the company’s share price shed a whopping 20 percent of its weight—that is, value.
In Denmark, on my last days there, I felt very serious. The cold Nordic air seemed clearer than the air at home in New York. As the sun set, I walked along the Copenhagen waterfront, looking out at the Øresund Strait. From the piers, beside a grove of ship masts, two elderly couples were skinny-dipping in cold seawater. They splashed and yelped and shivered and ran-hopped to seaside saunas. Their bodies were uninhibited and beautiful.
When I told some American friends I had been at Novo Nordisk, several railed against semaglutide as a tool of patriarchal control by an evil pharma empire. I usually like this kind of fire, but Novo didn’t have evil-empire hallmarks. All those people who worked there, the researchers, the quality control staff, even executives, sincerely seemed to be trying, within the tight constraints of markets, to prevent disease, treat disease, save lives. That much seems fixed. It was the company’s prime directive.
To understand Jørgensen’s situation, I tried my hand at squaring Novo’s sacred duty with its fiduciary responsibilities. All the investment and research and care and feeding of yeast. All the jobs. The taxes. The madness of rampant food noise and the health care non-system in the US. And government pricing—at home and abroad. The lobbying and marketing. No luck.
For a biotech company overseen by a nonprofit to hit on the magic ingredient and to achieve, however briefly, world dominion and otherworldly profits, it was almost Faustian. I couldn’t shake the idea that Novo was at increasingly steep odds with itself, like a body devouring its own pancreas. And now Wall Street was “disappointed” that Novo’s latest drug didn’t induce weight loss more precipitous than 22 percent. Perhaps investors won’t wholeheartedly green-light Novo again until they see returns of 100 percent weight loss, the full deletion of human bodies.
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