AMAZING FIND.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20363, 21 July 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

AMAZING FIND.

Pituitary Gland’s Importance

to Body. CANCER RESEARCH ADVANCE. JN HIS recently delivered Goulstonian Lectures Professor E. C. Dodds, of the Middlesex Hospital, has added another page to our knowledge of pituitary gland, writes the medical correspondent of the “ Daily Telegraph. ’ He records a number of important discoveries; and it is safe to say that no other avenue of medical research is, at the moment, 'richer in promise or has led us closer to the innermost secrets both of bodily health and disease. Weighing less than a fifth of an ounce and tucked away in a bony cavity upon the base of the skull, the pituitary gland was for long regarded as little more than a vestigial relic. Embryonically it was known to consist of two elements, one derived from the primitive brain and the other from the primitive mouth. Later it was found that the condition known as giantism was associated with disease of this gland, which was therefore assumed to have some influence on bodily growth. Importance Revealed.

It is only in recent years, however, that the enormous importance of this carefully guarded, almost inaccessible, primitive structure began to be revealed. It is now* known to exert a .presidential and controlling influence over most, if not all, the other ductless glands of the human body with their vital hormones, or internal secretions.

It might almost be said to be the central controlling station of all the essential, involuntary, instinctive functions of the human animal. Many of the hormones thus controlled by the pituitary gland have now, thanks to the work of Professor Dodds and many ether investigators, been so far investigated that iheir chemistry and molecular structure is already known. Moreover, many of them can now be isolated, or substances almost identical can be synthesised in the laboratory; and drugs like adrenalin or ephedrine are already established in consequence among the most valuable weapons of medicine. Chemical Affinities.

Perhaps the most remarkable of the many recent discoveries recorded by Professor Dodds in this new field is the extraordinary chemical resemblance between the hormone known as oestrin and the cancer-producing element in tar isolated two or three years ago. From the point of view of the ultimate discovery of the nature of cancer, this is obviously an advance of the first magnitude. Almost as interesting is the close relation now revealed between this hormone and the lately discovered chemical composition of Vitamin D.