1980 Articles

Hormones in Vitro: Hormones and Cell Culture . Papers from a conference, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., Aug. 1978. Gordon H. Sato and Russell Ross, Eds. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., 1979. In two volumes. xlii, 982 pp., illus. $95. Cold Spring Harbor Conferences on Cell Proliferation, vol. 6.

Pollack, Robert

My dictionary defines a hormone as a substance found in some organ of the body and carried by a body fluid to another organ or tissue, where it has a specific regulatory effect. Hormonal regulatory functions thus presumably are played out only in a whole body. Cell culture frees the cells of the body from such distinctions as internal and external, tissue and organ, and makes them all equally accessible to experimental manipulation of their capacities to grow and to differentiate. For hormone physiology, what cell culture gives in convenience it takes in relevance: how can a hormone be defined without a body? In recent years, however, a convergence of the two lines of inquiry has come about as a result of the demonstration that serum, the stuff put in culture medium to get cells to grow, can be replaced in many cases by a mix of factors so like the hormones of classic physiology as to render their differences from such hormones merely semantic.