(3 of 4)
Clinicians have given prolactin to human mothers to stimulate milk production. Result: some successes, some failures. In the failures, however, the mammary tissue of the mother was usually itself deficient. The job of preparing the mammary tissue for nursing seems to belong to the sex hormones estrone and progesterone. Prolactin's job is to start milk secretion after the breasts are ready.
Charting & Checking. The station at Cold Spring Harbor is a cluster of buildings beside a tranquil bay off Long Island Sound. There Dr. Riddle and his co-workers have painstakingly tested prolactin and other front-lobe hormones on normal animals, fasting animals, animals without pituitaries, without thyroids, without adrenals.
They have measured the crop-sac response of pigeons so closely that it serves as a quantitative test for prolactin in samples sent there by other laboratories. Dr. Bates, who took part in the original discovery of the hormone, has specialized in this "biological assay." Dr. Schooley has worked out a pituitary removal technique for pigeons, going in through the pharynx at the back of the throat, which leaves the back lobe of the gland intact so that almost all the birds survive the operation.
In Dr. Riddle's opinion, the higher vertebrates have a dual control system, the brain and the pituitary. That they are closely associated is shown by the ability of prolactin to produce a psychological phenomenon, maternal behavior. How hormones work on the brain and nervous system remains a stubborn mystery. The fact of their association, however, shows that mind and body are not separate, that a living organism is one "body-mind." Says he: "The mind has been firmly placed in an evolutionary frame. . . . The consciousness of dog and man has evolved . . . in the same unbroken way that the function of the digestive or glandular system has evolved."
Crusader. Oscar Riddle was born in Cincinnati, Ind., got his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, after returning from a natural history expedition to South America's Orinoco River, was well on the way to becoming an ichthyologist when a lecture on evolution gave a new turn to his career. He went to the Carnegie Institution's station at Cold Spring Harbor in 1912 as a research associate, and, except for a Wartime sojourn in France, has stayed there ever since.
When Dr. Riddle talks most earnestly about glands, he is apt for emphasis to indicate their location on his own person, and his eyes begin to sparkle. He smokes a great many de-nicotinized cigarets down to ragged little stubs. In his enthusiasm he lunches in his laboratory on sandwiches, coffee and condensed cream, perhaps with the bloody carcass of a rat in the sink at his elbow and surrounded by jars of pickled pigeon specimens. He used to play golf but has given it up, used to be a bachelor, but gave that up also almost at the age of 60, when he married in 1937.
His only hobby nowadays is the propagation of biologic truth—which, says Oscar Riddle, provides man with his "just hope for grandeur and power, and happiness." No cloistered, secretive scientist, he constantly sallies forth to preach the necessity of wider understanding of biological research.