Pure Hormone

The growth-promoting substance that made Alice in Wonderland's Alice shoot up through the treetops has been discovered at last. Drs. Herbert McLean Evans and Choh Hao Li of the University of California announced in last week's Science that they have isolated a few milligrams of it in pure form--not enough to practice on little girls with, but enough to practice on rats.

The substance is a protein with a huge, complex molecule of a type known as a euglobulin. It is called pure pituitary growth hormone. From two pounds of the front part of beef pituitary glands, Dr. Li extracts about a thousandth of an ounce.

Four other hormones from the front part of the pituitary have already been isolated: e.g., prolactin, the mother-love hormone (TIME, Jan. 9, 1939). One is still unisolated. Of the three hormones from the back part of the pituitary, two are marketed together as pituitrin. They raise blood pressure and stimulate uterine contractions.

The growth hormone has always been the most famous pituitary hormone. In the 19203 Dr. Evans was using crude extracts of it to make rats as big as small dogs. By 1935 he was making outsize dachshunds. He thinks the pure product will be useful in preventing children with pituitary deficiency from becoming dwarfs. But he does not think enough will ever be available to make undersized nations bigger. Said he last week, when someone suggested that the Japs might get rid of their inferiority complex by using the growth hormone: "We are not interested in creating a race of behemoths or a regiment of giants."

Warning: too much of the hormone, especially in adults, produces acromegaly, a form of giantism characterized by huge hands, feet and lower jaws.

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