Medicine: Experimental Masculinity

Ten years ago a Frenchified Russian, Dr. Serge Voronoff, and a Kansan who almost became Governor of his State, Dr. John Richard Brinkley, made fame & fortune by grafting monkey and goat glands into decrepit males. Later a Viennese, Dr. Eugen Steinach, finding gland grafts useless, got beneficial results by a small operation which prevented the gradual loss of male hormones, which make men virile. But the real advance in man's age-old search for virility began only: 1) when Dr. Adolf Butenandt of Germany, after treating 62,500 gallons of urine, succeeded in crystallizing one two-thousandths of an ounce of male sex hormone called "androsterone"; 2) when Leopold Ruzicka of Switzerland manufactured a similar substance "testosterone" from the fat of sheep's wool (TIME, Sept. 2, 1935).

With a supply of testosterone, Drs. Samuel Alexander Vest & John Eager Howard of Johns Hopkins a year ago began to administer the substance to: 1) men who were undersexed because they had never developed; and 2) men whose virility had been destroyed by disease. By last week they had enough evidence to warrant a preliminary report:

All patients improved, achieved or regained manhood. One felt like "fighting wildcats." But these benefits continued only during the administration of the hormone. Drs. Vest & Howard cautiously warned: "It is only a substitution therapy, and certainly in instances of marked hypogonadism [under-functioning of the sex organs] it must be given continuously for sustained effect. . . . These clinical results can be regarded as being entirely in an experimental phase."