> Do you think they just discovered (isolated) it and figured out what it could do in one decade? Absolutely. They also did not have to figure out what it could do per se, they could have just decided "well, this is the feminizing hormone, so let's put it into Hitler's food and it'll probably feminize him." WW2 and the Cold War are full of stories of governments attempting novel ideas like that. Since Europeans had, by that point, a thousand+ years of experience with seeing how hops makes women and men more feminine, they'd have had a decent reason for theorizing that the female hormone would do the same.