Endocrine Abstracts

Students in professional health care programmes fear biochemical structures, terms and concepts. Some teachers use storytelling and // or anthropomorphisms subconsciously. I, however, am exploring their wider use. Outside of regulated curricula, I developed outreach formats for A-level students. These formats ran with great success from 2014 until Corona. Subsequently, I expanded them to an introductory textbook material in endocrine biochemistry. This way of communicating scientific content may help to organize knowledge. Within Legitimation Code Theory, it would specifically be the Autonomy and the Semantics dimensions, mainly supporting this storytelling approach. This abstract is to share experience and best practice of innovative teaching, and to explore the pedagogic theory behind anthropomorphic storytelling. Starting off with the famous quote by George Box – ‘All analogies are wrong, but some are useful’ – certain scientific content is paired with dedicated, but unorthodox visualizations. At times, endocrine topics are related to everyday objects. There are useful analogies, that allow some sort of reasoning within the realm of the analogy. Some topics require complex and // or mixed analogies. Here, I explore the journey of a hormone. Starting with hormone biosynthesis and regulated release from secreting cell, we will look at different stages of the whole hormone signaling process: the distribution of the hormonal ‘message-in-a-bottle’ throughout the body, the passing of some hormones through membranes, and pre-receptor metabolism. Binding to different classes of receptors is not the end of hormone signaling, but the beginning of a second phase of signaling via second messengers, before hormonal messages are switched off again.

Further readings: Dominic LAI, Jonathan Wolf MUELLER. Understanding the Biochemistry of Hormones – Message in a Bottle. Review article. In peer review at Essays in Biochemistry, submitted 22nd Sep 2024. Jonathan Wolf MUELLER. 2023. Ultimately Understanding Biochemistry. German edition. Springer Nature. Book. doi. 10.1007/978-3-662-66194-9.