THE HORMONES IN HUMAN REPRODUCTION 



RATE OF SECRETION OF THE CORPUS LUTEUM 

 HORMONE 



It happens that of all the endocrine glands, the corpus 

 luteum is the one with which we can go farthest at present 

 toward calculating the answers to the questions with which 

 this chapter opens. The amount of glandular tissue can be 

 ascertained, for it occurs in discrete masses of more or less 

 spherical form and is composed of cells which can be measured 

 and even counted with a fair degree of accuracy. The chemical 

 structure and molecular weight of the hormone are fully 

 known, and the dose necessary to produce certain definite 

 effects is known. With these data at hand, let us take pencil 

 and paper and see how far we can get. 



The following calculations are of course approximate, not 

 precise. They represent a preliminary exploration in a brand 

 new field of study. There are unavoidable flaws in our pro- 

 cedure. In our arithmetical operations, for instance, we shall 

 have to combine figures obtained from observations on rab- 

 bits with others learned from swine, thus violating one of the 

 primary-grade rules of arithmetic, picturesquely stated long 

 ago by one of my teachers, "You can't add cows and horses." 

 Some other uncertainties will appear as we go along. If our 

 results come out anywhere between 50 per cent and 200 per 

 cent of the true figures we shall be doing very well for a start. 

 Physicians who have to decide on the dosage of ovarian hor- 

 mones for their patients will be glad to have even that; and 

 as for my lay readers, they may at least fmd this chapter 

 amusing. At any rate, when I presented some of these calcula- 

 tions at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative 

 Biology in 1937, that earnest little assembly of research men 

 surprised itself — and me — by being very much amused, partly 

 perhaps because it really was funny to see a medical man so 

 gaily slip the leash and wander down a strange pathway, and 

 partly because of the incongruity between our simple experi- 



{ 180 } 



