The External Secretion of the Pancreas as a Whole and 



the Communication between the Endoplasmic Reticulum 



and the Golgi Bodies* 



GoTTWALT Christian Hirsch 



Zoologisches Institute 

 Gottingen, Germany 



I have only a few remarks to make here : about logical basis of methods, 

 about the external secretion of the pancreas as a whole, and about the 

 "missing link" between the endoplasmic reticulum and the work of the 

 Golgi bodies. 



I, The logical basis of methods 



The external secretion of the pancreas — as perhaps every kind of 

 secretion — may be compared with the production of a factory [71, loi]: 

 in both cases raw material comes in and products of the factory go out. 

 Between these two events lies the synthesis of a particular product. This 

 production flows through a cell in a way which may be compared to an 

 "assembly line", because the synthesis of the particular product does 

 not take place in one structure of the cell, but gradually in different 

 places and structural parts of the cell, and in a particular order step by 

 step. Naturally, this comparison between an " assembly line " and secretion 

 has limitations [71] : the cell has no conveyor belts or rollers. But there is 

 a movement of material step by step, from one cell structure to another, 

 carrying the slowly developing product along. There are structures which, 

 furthermore, approximately portray the workers on an assembly line : for 

 instance the ribosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi field. Finally 

 there are other cell structures which produce materials which are then 

 moved to the place on the assembly line where they are biochemically 

 necessary : for instance, the mitochondria and the cell nucleus. 



It is the task of integrated structural and biochemical studies to 

 observe the order of occurrence in the processes of secretion. With every 

 new technique new observations, microscopical and biochemical are made, 

 which have to be integrated in the scheme of a "production line". This 

 integration is often difficult because the different investigators do not 



* This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgenieinschaft Bad 

 Godesberg bei Bonn, Germany. 



