Word: thymus
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...most baffling glands in the body is the thymus. It lies just below the neck and behind the top of the breastbone, and in all the centuries that man has been studying physiology, its purpose has been unclear. It has hitherto fallen to butchers, marketing the thymus of the lamb and calf as the "neck sweetbread," to give the gland its only obvious usefulness. Now a British cancer researcher...
Pursuing the search, Physiologist Williams found a substance apparently identical with the juvenile hormone in nearly every animal material from tenderloin steak to the human placenta. The richest source in any mammal seems to be the thymus gland, which is believed to control growth. Significantly, Williams found no trace of his golden oil in any vegetable...
...Billy Lucas' response to the first injection was unusually dramatic. Now he is getting the drug in tablet form every three hours. But he has another chance for relief, now that the doctors know what ails him: his disease seems to be connected with the working of the thymus gland, and about half the victims of myasthenia gravis get better after removal of the thymus...
...been injecting ovarian hormone extracts into rats, hoping to find evidences of a new hormone. Instead, after careful autopsies, he found only evidences of poisoning such as he got with injections of substances picked at random from the laboratory shelves. The rats' adrenal glands were enlarged, the thymus wasted away and the stomach ulcerated. Dr. Hans Selye concluded sadly that he had been wasting his time. Then it struck him: none of the substances which he had injected had directly caused death, but all had caused an unbearable stress or strain on the rats' systems. Stress was what...
Finally, even resistance wears out. Then the system reaches the stage of exhaustion. This was what Dr. Selye had found in his rats in 1936, shown by enlarged and overactive adrenals, wasted thymus and bleeding ulcers. But exhaustion, the last phase, may produce many other "diseases of adaptation," notably some types of high blood pressure, several kidney diseases, rheumatoid and gouty arthritis...