Word: glands
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With Thanksgiving just weeks away, Arthur Flemming last Monday gave cranberry growers the short end of the wishbone. Experimenting with "aminotriazole," a weed-killing chemical that some Pacific Northwest growers use in their bogs, government chemists had produced cancer in the thyroid gland of a mouse. "Just to be on the safe side," Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, advised America's housewives not to buy any cranberries until extensive testing had been completed...
...Then he got interested in transplanting organs from animals to humans. (By no coincidence, this was at the height of the late Serge Voronoff's vogue as a transplanter of monkey testicles.) In 1931 Dr. Niehans had a woman patient whom he rated too ill for a gland transplant. He gave her instead an injection of cells from the ground-up parathyroids of a newborn lamb. Last week, a sprightly 75, she wrote Dr. Niehans from Bern to say that she "never felt better...
...silkworm cocoons from Italy and Japan, opened them up with razor blades, separated the pupae of 310,000 females from the males. What followed, in the words of one researcher, was "a mass slaughter, and not for the fainthearted." Each tiny pupa was disemboweled, the scent glands carefully cut out. Male moths served as lab assistants: when they were placed near fractions into which the gland material had been divided, their fluttering wings told the scientists which parts contained the magic substance...
...named Iridomyrmex humilis. Spreading rapidly from their beachhead, the tiny invaders took on the heftiest ants of Italy, annihilated them by the colony. Putting them under the microscope, University of Pavia's Zoologist Mario Pavan got to their secret: a sac of grey, waxy poison in the anal gland...
Equally surprising was the finding that the body's output and metabolism of these substances depend on how well the thyroid gland is functioning. This close relationship between two supposedly distinct systems had not been suspected. A significant item: the body's output of androsterone declines with advancing years. This may explain why some diseases increase in old age, and suggests a clue to ways of slowing them down...