Word: thyroxine
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...physiologists. It is known that a very delicate acid-base equilibrium is essential for conception. This equilibrium is very easily upset, and nothing seems to affect it more quickly and decisively than psychological disturbances. . . . The thyroid gland is especially prompt in its reaction to psychological stimuli. Its secretions, containing thyroxin, are produced during normal sexual intercourse in such abundance as almost to constitute an eruption. This energetic secretion of thyroxin would appear to be an essential preliminary to conception. Inhibiting the function of the thyroid by emotional stress or other conditions is therefore at least one, and an important, factor...
Thus a person with an underactive thyroid need not take thyroxin the rest of his life. Nor need one with a deficient parathyroid forever take calcium-bearing drugs to ward off spasms. If Professor Stone can extend his system of culturing minced glands to include the pancreas and the adrenals, he indicated last week, surgeons would have a simple, permanent cure for diabetes and Addison's disease. But, warned the able doctor: "No type or method of grafting can reasonably be expected to yield 100% successful results...
...neck with x-rays or the surgeon may cut out part of her goitre. Dosing with hormones is less brutal than surgery. Doctors begged pharmacologists to give them in pure form the active principles of the endocrine glands. When Chemist Edwin Calvin Kendall of the Mayo Clinic isolated thyroxin, the essence of the thyroid, about 15 years ago, a loud cry of applause arose. Since then other hormones have been refined and analyzed. Last week Professor Leopold Ruzicka of Zurich significantly reported in Nature that he had synthesized the male sex hormone. To get it, this altogether reputable scientist attacked...