Endocrine Abstracts

It is increasingly common for research funding bodies to ask applicants to demonstrate how the outcome of the proposed research will benefit society or the economic wellbeing of the country. This pre-supposes that the results of the research are somehow predictable and thus diminishes the importance of ‘blue skies’ or curiosity-driven research and the role played by luck or chance in major scientific discoveries. I shall describe how throughout history accidental fin...

Even before the identities and structures of many hormones were established, endocrinologists and physiologists had speculated about the mechanism of their action. A hundred years later, we are still struggling to establish in molecular and cellular terms the mode of physiological action of a given hormone. Two major reasons account for this situation: i) the failure to recognise that hormones as signalling molecules have been highly conserved during evolution but that their p...