- How did Kocher reduce thyroid surgery mortality from roughly one in eight to under one percent?
- What symptoms did Kocher observe in patients after total thyroidectomy that revealed the thyroid's role in the body?
- What surgical techniques did Kocher refine to make thyroid operations safer?
Endocrinology and Hormones
The study of hormones and the endocrine system.
- Why did nineteenth-century thyroid surgery patients sometimes die of violent muscular spasms after their operations?
- How did ablation experiments demonstrate the link between the parathyroid glands and blood calcium levels?
- Why did it take until the 1950s and 1960s to isolate parathyroid hormone in pure form, decades after its function was established?
- What precautions do surgeons take today to preserve the parathyroid glands during thyroid operations?
- Why did Frederick Banting tie off the pancreatic ducts of dogs before extracting a hormone from the islets of Langerhans?
- What shared molecular structure did Wieland find underlying bile acids?
- Why did Wieland's work on bile acids turn out to matter for hormones like cortisone and vitamin D?
- Why does the thyroid gland concentrate iodine so effectively compared to other tissues?
- How was radioactive iodine-131 first used to treat thyroid disease?
- How did Adolf Butenandt manage to isolate sex hormones from such enormous quantities of urine?
- What is the chemical connection between terpenes found in plants like turpentine and steroid hormones in the body?
- Why was Butenandt unable to accept his Nobel Prize when it was awarded in 1939?
- What medical applications eventually emerged from the isolation of oestrone, androsterone, and progesterone?
- What other areas of food chemistry did Virtanen work on alongside his silage research?
- How did Bernardo Houssay show that pituitary hormones counteract the effects of insulin?
- Why is blood sugar regulation described as a conversation between organs rather than the work of the pancreas alone?
- How did researchers determine which adrenal gland compound was actually essential for life?
- What happened when Philip Hench administered cortisone to patients with rheumatoid arthritis?
- What range of modern conditions are now treated with anti-inflammatory steroids derived from this discovery?
- What two pituitary hormones did Vincent du Vigneaud work out the structure of, and what does each do in the body?
- What did du Vigneaud actually accomplish in 1953 that counts as the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone?
- How did du Vigneaud confirm that his synthetic oxytocin was structurally and functionally identical to the natural hormone?
- Who synthesized the hormones that made the first oral contraceptive pill possible, and where did that work happen?
- What were the ethical problems with the clinical trials Gregory Pincus ran in Puerto Rico and Haiti?
- Why was Enovid initially approved for menstrual disorders rather than contraception?
- What broader social changes has the separation of sex from conception risk been linked to since 1960?
- Why is cholesterol indispensable to the body despite its reputation for causing disease?
- What did Charles Huggins discover about the relationship between male sex hormones and prostate cancer growth?
- Why was the idea of starving a cancer of hormones, rather than cutting or irradiating it, considered novel in 1941?
- What did Derek Barton show about how a molecule's 3D shape affects its chemical reactions?
- How does adrenaline trigger changes inside a liver cell without ever crossing the cell membrane?
- Why was Genentech's production of somatostatin in bacteria such an important proof of concept?
- What are hypothalamic releasing hormones, and why did it take two rival laboratories nearly two decades to isolate them?
- How does radioimmunoassay let researchers measure a hormone present at only a few nanograms per millilitre of blood?
- Why did the Nobel committee award the prize to Guillemin and Schally jointly rather than crediting one over the other?
- How did a technique built for endocrinology end up used for cancer markers and drug monitoring?
- Why did Ulf von Euler name prostaglandins after the prostate, and why was that name wrong?
- What biological processes do prostaglandins regulate in the body?
- What did Elwood Jensen discover about how oestrogen interacts with cells in the 1960s?
- What did Douglas Coleman's parabiosis experiments with obese mice reveal about appetite control?
- What is leptin and how does it signal the brain to suppress appetite?
- How did the discovery of leptin change scientific understanding of obesity?
- Why would riding a roller coaster temporarily relieve asthma symptoms?
- What is the physiological link between the stress response and airway constriction?
- How did Lefkowitz isolate and clone the adrenaline receptor using radioactive tracers?
- What did Kobilka's crystal structure of the beta-2 adrenergic receptor reveal about how it gets activated?
- What is HIF-1 and how does it let a cell sense whether it has enough oxygen?
- How did William Kaelin's research on a rare hereditary cancer syndrome connect to the oxygen-sensing pathway?
- Why does understanding the oxygen-sensing pathway matter for treating anaemia and tumours?
- How do tumours hijack the body's oxygen-sensing machinery to grow their own blood supply?
- What reflex were Ely and Petersen studying when they investigated milk ejection in dairy cows?
- How did placing a cat on a cow's back and exploding a paper bag serve as an experimental method?
- What did the disrupted milk let-down confirm about the effect of fear on the milk ejection reflex?
- What does GLP-1 do naturally in the body to regulate blood sugar after meals?
- Why was GLP-1's rapid destruction by plasma enzymes an obstacle to turning it into a drug?
- How did Lotte Bjerre Knudsen's fatty acid modification extend GLP-1's half-life into a once-weekly drug?
- How did a diabetes drug derived from GLP-1 come to be used for obesity treatment?
- What does GLP-1 do in the body after eating, and who first identified it in the 1980s?
- How did Lotte Bjerre Knudsen engineer semaglutide to survive in the bloodstream long enough for weekly dosing?