Science Authors

"During electroconvulsive therapy the blood-brain barrier is opened and during the time that it remains open there are heroically high levels of circulating pituitary hormones. Thus there is every reason to believe that... it delivers hormones to the brain..."

"Physicians and scientists will measure brain hormones—in ventricular fluid and elsewhere—will link these to specific diseases, and will devise space-age techniques to restock the mind's hormonal pantries. The only question is, When?'"

"Already in animals, some gland-like cells have been transplanted from the adrenal gland into the brain, where they not only survive but continue their secretions."

"By placing… cell-containing soup in bullet-shaped cell cages formed out of permeable plastics, a single population of cells can be introduced into the brain. ...the hormones that are produced by the cells make their way... into the brain. ...'artificial glands' …with no fear of cell migration."

"As it is possible that the memory loss of senile dementia may stem from a deficiency of 'memory peptide', obesity may result from a deficiency of either bombesin, somatostatin, cholecystokinen, gastrin, or insulin."

"Genetic engineers are powerless in all of this without some cooperative effort from people working in allied fields."

"If a 'memory peptide' could be found to be deficient in patients with dementia, these patients could be treated in the same way that patients with diabetes are treated with insulin."

"Scientists have mastered the techniques of hormone analysis, measurement and manufacture. What is lacking is the correlation between a specific brain disease and a specific brain hormone. …these correlations can only come from a medical team of co-operating physicians."

"Despite the evidence that ventricular hormones do not make their way out of the ventricle, the presence of large ventricles in many schizophrenic patients, and the ability of two-dimensional gels to provide a profile of peptides in the ventricle, not a single catheter has been placed into the ventricle of a schizophrenic patient to measure the peptides in the ventricle. ...There is no animal model for this disease, the answer can only come from human studies."

"Animal experiments have confirmed the necessity of delivering hormones into the ventricle: the powerful hormone endorphin does not change behaviour if it is given intravenously; vasopressin will improve memory in animals only if it given into the ventricles; insulin given through the bloodstream does not control appetite but it is the best hormone for such control if given into the brain; and bombesin... only stops stomach ulceration if given into the brain."

"Miracles of inner healing are everyday occurrences."

"The brain is a gland of unity: the brain is one with the body."

"What is learning but a set of sensory signals from the environment, with different forms of learning resulting from different types or patterns of sensory signals?"

"Neurosurgeons perform ventricular taps with great frequency. …While this is not something to be done lightly, the risks are no greater than those for cardiac catheterization."

"The ventricles of the human brain... are filled with hormones, and until the hormones swimming in these oceans are dredged out, countless millions of our fellows will remain with brain illnesses that can be neither understood nor treated. Many of their hormone-hungry brains may be fixed as easily as hormone-hungry bodies are fixed with thyroid hormone, insulin, oestrogen and testosterone, but that work cannot begin until cause and effect relationships between brain hormones and brain diseases have been established."

"Twenty years from now, the disease, 'presenile dementia' will be understood as well as diabetes is today."

"In decades to come ventricular catheterization performed to measure hormone concentrations will become as routine as the measurement of lumbar 'pressure' is today."

"Many endocrine diseases of the body entail the production of 'crooked molecules'—molecules that are made in the wrong way by the cell. It is fairly common for a cancer cell to begin the production of a 'crooked' hormone that evokes dramatic changes in other body functions."

"The brain has all the characteristics of a gland except one—leaky capillaries—the sturdy brain capillaries are collectively called the 'blood-brain-barrier'. This barrier can easily be demonstrated by injecting a blue dye into an animal; every other organ (except the testicle) turns blue, but the blood-brain barrier keeps the brain as white as snow."

"As hormonal amplification is the hallmark of all of the brain-to-gland relationships of neuroendocrinology, hormonal deamplification is the hallmark of all gland-to-brain relationships of endocrine neurology. This is the fundamental difference between the two sciences."

"Some kinds of hormones, the 'steroids', pass readily into the brain, but the 'peptide' hormones produced by the pituitary, the gut, and any other glands do not easily pass through the walls of brain capillaries."

"It would be easier... if all animals spoke the same endocrine language, for then correlations made in the laboratory could be quickly moved to the bedside. Unfortunately, such is not the case. The hormone prolactin, for example, has at least seventy-eight different functions in seventy-eight different species"

"Few would have predicted that the discovery of the circulation of the blood would have changed the way philosophers view the world, theologians conceive of God, or astronomers look at the stars, yet all of that happened."

"If the question, 'Why is the heart hollow?', had a profound impact on all intellectual disciplines, would you expect any less of the question, 'Why is the brain hollow?'"

"The brain remains silently separated from the noisy endocrine consequences."

"In the past decade, as regulating hormones have been found throughout the body, the soul has lost its home. It is scattered everywhere—in the brain, the gut, the ovary, the pituitary and the adrenal; if paracrinologists are correct, every cell contains the well-chiselled molecules that give life to the soul and guidance to the mind."

"The neatly integrated paradigm for brain water... was derived from experiments done by Walter Dandy... Most brain scientists and brain physicians honour the Dandy paradigm as a navigator honours the North Star. ...yet new scientific evidence makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accept... It is a mismeme; the experimental facts no longer allow it to be 'true', and we need a paradigm switch."

"Dandy's experiments were done in the fast lane of science... performed with no control animals, with no record of the number of animals operated on, with no regard for inter-species variability, with no record of the time base, with no histological correlation, with no attempt to quantify the differences and with no involvement with a neutral scientist."

"If the powerful hormone vasopressin, or ADH, is injected into the blood, the body will retain water. If ADH is injected into the ventricle the opposite happens: the body loses water."

"Gone are the days when scientists believed one hormone was made by one gland. Insulin, for example... is made in other surprising places, like the brain, and even by tiny one-cell organisms without a pancreas."

"The measurement of hormones in the bloodstream of patients will not reflect the endocrine activity of the brain."

"Every organ is a hormone-producing gland."

"Central to the paradigm that the mind is modulated by hormones is the recognition that the stuff of thought is not caged in the brain but is scattered all over the body; regulatory hormones are ubiquitous."

"Those at the top in brain science gained their pedestals by knowing more and more about less and less."

"The double-think of modern science—'Molecules shape the body, but electricity shapes the mind'—ends abruptly with the realization that regulatory hormones control both brain and body functions."

"Pattern recognition is the sine qua non of the genetic code... pattern recognition underlies all immunology... pattern recognition is basic to all the hormone/hormone receptor interactions of cell regulation; and pattern recognition is the highest form of thought. It is the synchrony, the synergism and the spatial juxtaposition of whirling hormonal forces that give life to the human soul. Is this molecular maelstrom divine? I think so: it creates life, it is ubiquitous, it cannot be broken apart, it cannot be contained, it cannot be copied, it is eternal."

"Regulatory messages or hormones flow from specific regions of the brain to specific glands within 'hollow' nerve fibres exactly as Erasistratus, Galen and Descartes had taught."

"Brain/body relationships might depend upon a chorus of individual hormones... which are released together to sing hormonal harmonies to the body."

"Not all ideas of the ideas that pass from one brain to another brain... are good ideas; some are mistakes. These I call 'mismemes'."

"The existing paradigm about the brain has ceased to function adequately."

"The science of neuroendocrinology—the brain-to-pituitary link that was discerned by [Joe] Hinsey, [George] Wislocki, du Vigneaud, and [Geoffrey] Harris—is dependent upon hormones flowing within nerve axons. This phenomenon, axonal flow, was first noted by Ernst and Barta Scharrer... For many decades it was assumed that axonal flow was always 'down'... away from the brain."

"The belief that electricity, the fourth of the modern forces, is the stuff of thought has permeated brain science since the late 1700s. ...while the brain was regarded as 'dry', all other organs were conceived as 'wet'. Doubtless the study of brain electricity helped in understanding the internal circuits of the brain, but it solved few problems of brain disease."

"Whatever the cerebellum is doing, it’s doing a lot of it."

"Amending your own mind is very, very satisfying… amending other people's minds is a fruitless, unsatisfying effort."

"The greatest array of brain hormones is found in the ventricle, not in the spinal fluid."

"Neurosurgery can be learned... neurosurgery cannot be taught."

"Jacob and Monod found that in bacteria, genes are switched on and off by other genes. This led them to distinguish between effector genes and regulatory genes. Effector genes encode effector proteins... which mediate specific cellular functions. Regulatory genes encode proteins called regulatory proteins, which switch the effector genes on or off."

"Molecules move not only from the brain to the endocrine system but also from the endocrine system, indeed, from all parts of the body to the brain."

"Jacob and Monod not only outlined a theory of gene regulation, they also discovered the first regulators of gene transcription. These regulators come in two forms—repressors, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that shut genes off, and as later work showed, activators, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that turn genes on."

"Most energy analysts would accept the core of the “efficiency trap” argument, namely, that greater efficiency... does not automatically mean lower consumption. On the contrary, greater efficiency can lead – and has led – to bigger products... and therefore to overall energy use that is just as high, if not higher, than before. ...but he gets carried away with blaming poor old efficiency for a whole manner of ills..."