The beginnings of the science of endocrinology can be traced back to the
middle 1800s and a German physiologist by the name of Arnold Berthold. He
worked with roosters. I don't have any roosters here but as you know I do have
plenty of ducks, so I enlisted this guy to play the role of a rooster but in
order to do that he needs a comb and that is exactly what Berthold was
interested in. He took a rooster. He castrated the poor animal and noticed
that the comb on top of roosters head just collapsed and then he took the
testicle that he had removed he put it back into the body cavity and lo and
behold the comb became erect again. He recognized the
fact that the testicle was releasing something into the bloodstream that had
this effect. He of course did not know what that was and he never coined the
word hormone that came fifty years later when Ernest Starling and William Bayliss,
two other physiologists, carried out a very interesting experiment and isolated the
first hormone called secretin. They found that there was a chemical release from
the small intestine when it was exposed to food that found its way into the
bloodstream and triggered the release of digestive juices from the pancreas.
This was a chemical messenger, a signal that stirred other organs into action so they
coined the term hormone from the Greek for "to stir into action"
Well this intrigued Fred Koch, who was a professor of
chemistry at the University of Chicago and he was keen on isolating what
specific compounds were present that could be used as chemical messengers.
He focused on bulls because he knew that bulls had big testes and that these
would produce a lot of interesting chemicals so he made a deal with the
Chicago stockyards because they of course had a lot of
bulls and the bulls had a lot of appendages. And these appendages —
so-called Prairie oysters — didn't have much commercial value so the stockyards
were quite okay with having the animals castrated and giving the testes to Koch
for his research. He enlisted students to extract chemicals, separate them and
eventually isolated a substance that, when injected into other animals,
triggered masculinizing effects. A few years later a couple of companies
actually isolated the compound and called it testosterone playing homage to
the origin that is testes and stirone from the fact that these chemicals
belong to a class of compounds called sterones. So testosterone in 1936 was
already available and it came to the attention of the Germans during the
Olympics. German athletes actually took testosterone in order to boost their
performance on the playing field and it worked. By the time that we had the
Olympics here in Montreal in 1976, various kinds of testosterone
derivatives were being used — mostly by the East Germans and Soviets — in order to
enhance their performance. But of course in Canada this really came home in 1988
at the Seoul Olympics when Ben Johnson, a Canadian, won the 100-meter run, which is
really the stellar event of the Olympics and it turned out that he had some help
from Stanozolol, a testosterone derivative that he had been taking.
This, of course, is no longer legal but the testosterone is very interesting because
as men age their natural levels of this chemical drop and therefore there's a
lot of interest in research seeing whether or not giving testosterone
supplements can help boost the libido and perhaps even boost energy.
So testosterone supplements are available but of course they must be prescribed by
a physician. No longer are these chemicals extracted from testes. They can
be synthesized quite readily in the laboratory and whether or not they boost
libido, boost energy, it's a matter of of opinion. I think if testosterone
levels are very low they actually might do something anyway here goes.
I feel energetic already!