Word: glands
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...PITUITARY GLAND. Just about the hardest part of the body for a surgeon to get at is the pea-sized pituitary gland (see diagram), producer of a few master hormones that govern the production of dozens of "slave" hormones. An overactive pituitary causes Cushing's syndrome, some forms of gigantism and adult overgrowth, and some cases of virilism in girls and women. Removal or deactivation of even a normally active pituitary helps some patients with advanced cancer of the breast or prostate, and diabetes victims going blind from bleeding of retinal arteries...
...three dimensions. Then the surgeons saw through the intervening bone and insert the ultracold cannula. Dr. Rand found that temperatures as low as -70° C. maintained for as long as 17 minutes had no appreciable effect on the stubbornly resistant pituitary. So he dropped the temperature inside the gland to between -170° C. and -190° C. With a probe-or sometimes with two, one in each lobe-held at this freeze level for 15 minutes, Dr. Rand's group has safely achieved the desired degree of pituitary destruction in more than 50 cases. Other neurosurgeons agree...
...baby's sucking action stimulates the release of the hormone, oxytocin, from her pituitary gland, which causes the womb to contract and hastens recovery from childbirth. Even more important, women who have nursed are less likely to develop breast cancer. Yet for all these advantages, only two out of every five U.S. mothers give their babies the opportunity to breast feed...
...thyroid gland is lax, my metabolism too slow to burn up actually normal rations of food...
...however, that each neuron is itself like a computer, and that eventually the idea that a machine has humanlike intelligence will become part of folklore. "We'll laugh at the idea," says Dr. Herbert Teager, an M.I.T. physicist, "as we do at Descartes' theory that the pineal gland is the center of the mind...