Randi Sutter Epstein’s book, “Aroused” says the history of hormones began with a German scientist doing a “wacky“ experiment in his backyard on chickens. He identified chemicals in the body which did not have to go into the blood stream to act. He did the experiment and published the paper but, says Epstein, he did not study its ramifications and so it took another fifty years before a British doctor came upon this all over again and said, as Epstein puts it, “… in 1905 that all these chemicals in the body, the pitutary, the adrenal etc., they all do the same sort of thing and we need one discipline to cover it…He said there are chemicals in the body that do not travel along the nerves, they do not need to start in one thing and be plugged into the next. They leave the gland and go directly to the testes or the ovaries… they act like wifi… and go straight to the place where they need to act. He went to his friend, a University of Cambridge classicist, and asked him for a word that would mean arouse or excite cell receptors. His friend suggested Hormola…and so we got hormones.”
In the early days science experiments were rather weird says Epstein, “…When they were doing studies, they were doing sort of weird experiments on people and dogs and all kind of things,” and she goes on to tell us about the Balabans, “… the Balabans are just a remarkable couple, particularly Barbara Balaban, Jeff's mom. She had been told that her son was too short. And - she's short. Her husband's short…eventually someone said, you know, maybe you should see a doctor about this, a specialist. The specialist said, your son needs growth hormone but we don't have growth hormone yet. This was the early 1960s. So if you want your son to get this treatment that we think he needs, you're going to have to collect pituitaries, which come from dead bodies, and then bring them back to us, and then we'll get the growth hormone out of it. So most people would just go home and cry and say this is impossible. And Barbara did that for about a day or two. And then she thought, you know what, her husband was a psychiatrist. He knew doctors. And she became one of the nation's (US)largest collectors of pituitary glands…”
Epstein describes many studies and how they have understood the working of the hormones. But she says, “We're on the cusp of really understanding hormones and behavior. So one of the more recent findings is hunger and hormones… The fascinating thing in terms of basic science and understanding our bodies is it's not hormones and obesity here. It's not so much that you have a mucked up metabolism that you gain weight easily. It's that because of your hormone defect, you feel compelled to keep eating…
