THE REGENERATIVE CAPACITY OF OVARIAN 



TISSUE 



S. ZUCKERMAN 

 Department of Anatomy, University of Birmingham 



If the whole of one ovary and all but a piece of the second 

 are removed from the body, the fragment that remains will 

 hypertrophy, and its volume may ultimately equal that of 

 two normal ovaries. If— to turn to another experiment— a 

 minute quantity of suitable gonadotrophin is injected into a 

 normal female animal, its ovaries will become transformed 

 into a mass of luteal tissue. These two changes are illustrative 

 of several which point to the conclusion that the ovary is not 

 only a very plastic structure, but also one with considerable 

 powers of cellular transformation and regeneration. On the 

 other hand, the conspicuous changes it can undergo give a 

 misleading impression about two central features of ovarian 

 physiology— the capacity of the mature ovary to generate 

 oocytes, and the dependence of the organ's secreting powers 

 on the normal ovarian structure. It is to these two issues, 

 which are critical to ideas about regeneration, that the present 

 paper is addressed. 



The formation of Oocytes 



The answer to the question whether neoformation of oocytes 

 occurs, or can be stimulated, in the adult mammalian ovary, 

 depends on histological, cytological, experimental and bio- 

 metric evidence. In an earlier review (Zuckerman, 1951) I 

 considered the merits of the different types of observation 

 which have been brought together to support the conflicting 

 views that oogenesis does occur, or does not occur in the adult 

 ovary, and concluded that the belief that oogenesis continues 



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