When you thought that the leader is this small gland sitting on the top of your head; it was proven that even that leader has a boss!
The gland was only the acting leader! There was another Boss who had the control all along!
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers is a book by Stanford University biologist Robert M. Sapolsky.
In the novel he talks about one of the greatest races in the endocrinology history!
The race to find who actually has the control!
The race was nasty and personal!
But then it did yield rich dividends!
The story is a runaway script from a soap opera!
For years Pituitary gland was thought to be the boss who controls the secretions of most of the hormonal glands in the body! But it was seen late that the isolated pituitary ‘behaved’ erratically!
It was as if there is a loss of control! While it allowed more secretions of certain hormones and stopped many others!
The postulation was that there was a real control CENTER in the brain!
Now these hormones are not like nerves which could be see or experimented to identify! Added to that the quantity secreted was so little!
The research was spearheaded by Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally!
They started together as close friends but one fine day a small argument made them part ways and they both created history separately!
Starting in the 1950s/1960s, these two researchers competed for nearly two decades!
Their work involved processing massive amounts of animal brain tissue (hundreds of thousands of sheep/pig carcasses) to isolate minute amounts of active substances!
The real zeal was to best the other! One of them even admitted that! The intense rivalry and public spectacle was a stuff of gossip mills in the scientific community!
Finally they both managed to isolate and characterize hypothalamic hormones (such as TRH, GnRH, and CRF).
They had found the BOSS! HYPOTHALAMUS!
The pioneering neuroendocrinologists who separately found the hormones finally SHARED the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that the brain, specifically the hypothalamus, controls the secretion of pituitary hormones!
WHo says competition is bad!
Everyone actually! Even the premise of the novel mentioned at the start of this blog also states that! The story of this competition leading to NOBEL is an exception; not an example!
Also Noble was Balraj Sahni!
Shubh ratri…
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