Word: prolactin
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...Prolactin caused chickless hens and virgin rats to mother chicks and ratlets with great affection. This earned prolactin the nickname of "mother love" hormone. The implication of the discovery was that mother love, though doubtless fortified and colored in women by training and tradition has a physiological basis in a chemical substance-probably large protein molecules. (Dr. Riddle found that prolactin and other front-lobe hormones are disintegrated by trypsin, an enzyme which has the special property of "digesting" proteins...
Busy Hormone. Prolactin also inhibits the activity of the sex glands, which is obviously nature's way of quieting the distraction of sex urges when parental behavior and responsibility are called for. And either alone or in concert with other hormones, it maintains the weight of abdominal organs; controls basal metabolism (heat production) ; promotes appetite; and probably also affects the metabolism of carbohydrates...
Clinicians have given prolactin to human mothers to stimulate milk production. Result: some successes, some failures. In the failures, however, the mammary tissue of the mother was usually itself deficient. The job of preparing the mammary tissue for nursing seems to belong to the sex hormones estrone and progesterone. Prolactin's job is to start milk secretion after the breasts are ready...
Charting & Checking. The station at Cold Spring Harbor is a cluster of buildings beside a tranquil bay off Long Island Sound. There Dr. Riddle and his co-workers have painstakingly tested prolactin and other front-lobe hormones on normal animals, fasting animals, animals without pituitaries, without thyroids, without adrenals...
They have measured the crop-sac response of pigeons so closely that it serves as a quantitative test for prolactin in samples sent there by other laboratories. Dr. Bates, who took part in the original discovery of the hormone, has specialized in this "biological assay." Dr. Schooley has worked out a pituitary removal technique for pigeons, going in through the pharynx at the back of the throat, which leaves the back lobe of the gland intact so that almost all the birds survive the operation...