In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r o n e Beginnings In 1919, upon their discharge from the United States Army after service in World War I, two young men found themselves in St. Louis. One was a gregarious , heavy-set biologist trained at Brown University; the other was a reserved, slim biochemist trained at Harvard.∞ Both had accepted positions at Washington University School of Medicine. Both were newly wed. Both liked to play baseball. And, within a decade, both would earn credit for their collaborative discovery of the female sex hormone, estrogen. The biologist, Edgar Allen, was born in Colorado in 1892. Soon thereafter, his family moved east to Rhode Island.≤ The biochemist, Edward Doisy, eighteen months younger than Allen, was born and raised in Illinois.≥ When they met as new instructors in St. Louis, 26-year-old Doisy and 27-year-old Allen formed a faculty baseball team, which beat all of the classes at Washington University except the freshmen.∂ Their friendship secured on the ball field, the two men introduced their wives, and the foursome spent many evenings playing bridge together.∑ In 1921, the couples moved to neighboring homes in South St. Louis. Doisy had a car, Allen did not. Since public transportation between their houses and their labs was unreliable, Allen and Doisy rode to and from work together in Doisy’s noisy Model T Ford. Naturally, the conversation revolved around their scientific research.∏ For his doctoral dissertation, Allen had studied the estrous cycle of the mouse. His thesis described the cellular changes in the animal’s sex organs during its reproductive cycle. In 1922–23 Doisy was involved in the purification of insulin, the hormone secreted by the pancreas and lacking in diabetics. Although insulin had been discovered and isolated by scientists in Toronto the year before, not much of the hormone had yet been produced. When a baby arrived at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in a diabetic coma in September 1922, Doisy’s boss suggested they make their own batch of insulin to save the child’s life. They succeeded, and Beginnings 11 the work on insulin continued. Six months later, on the way home from work one evening, Doisy was chatting with Allen about the hormonal nature of insulin. As he was describing how the cells of the pancreas gland secrete insulin, which then acts on other body cells to encourage the uptake of glucose sugar from the blood, Allen interrupted to draw a parallel with the female reproductive system. From his work with mice, he had noticed a relationship between the ripening of the follicle cells of the ovaries and the development of the uterus and vagina. Might this relationship be governed by hormones?π To test his hypothesis, Allen decided to inject the liquid from the follicles of sow ovaries (obtained from a nearby meat packing plant) under the skin of female mice and rats whose ovaries had been removed. To obtain the desired fluid, he enlisted the help of his wife, and together they extracted the liquid from the follicle cells at their kitchen table.∫ Back in the laboratory, the substance from the ovaries of the sow caused the vaginas of the mice and rats to become estrous, as evidenced by cellular changes clearly visible under the microscope. Allen then injected the follicular liquid into baby mice and rats, which stimulated the vaginas and uteruses of those animals to rapidly mature to adult size. These results proved the existence of some ‘‘estrogenic hormone’’ (so called because it stimulated estrous growth in the sex organs) in the fluid extracted from the sow ovaries. Allen’s work, which continued at the University of Missouri, to which he moved in 1923 to become professor of anatomy and, later, dean of the medical school, led to the development of a quick and easy assay that biochemists could use to test the potency of hormonal extracts.Ω While Allen was performing these animal experiments, Doisy set to work trying to purify the active substance in the follicular fluid. His work was complicated by the fact that sow ovaries were neither inexpensive nor easy to come by. He negotiated a deal with a pharmaceutical company that had access to a local meat packing factory, but in 1927 a scientific report from Berlin released Doisy from his dependence on pig parts. Two German scientists, Selmar Ascheim and Bernhard Zondek, had discovered that the estrogenic hormone was found in large quantities in the urine of pregnant...

Share