Endocrinology and Aging

Abstract

The inevitability of hormone-mediated senescence in the female reproductive system well in advance of death of the organism has long focused attention on the possibility that hormones mediate the aging process. That aging might reflect, at least in part, deficiency of hormone action raised the attractive prospect of the postponement of aging with hormone replacement therapy. This prospect in large measure explains the inordinate amount of attention which hormonal factors have periodically received in attempts to account for senescence. It also explains the blemishes on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century medical history of attempts to graft into old men the gonads of goats (and other animals) to effect “rejuvenation.” Old scientists were among those who generously offered to be the recipients of such grafts.