Kendall, Edward Calvin 1886-1972

KENDALL, EDWARD CALVIN 1886-1972

Hormone hunter

Research Chemist

Edward C. Kendall was born on 8 March 1886 in South Norwalk, Connecticut, the third of eight children. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University in 1910 and then worked for a year as a research chemist for Parke, Davis and Company in Detroit, where he took on the task of extracting the thyroid hormone from the thyroid gland. Hormones are natural secretions of the endocrine glands that serve as the chemical messengers of the body; they are potent substances that activate, coordinate, and regulate the phenomena of life. Although scientists had theorized that the thyroid gland must produce some substance that was directly delivered into the blood, no one had yet succeeded in isolating and chemically identifying the thyroid hormone.

Mayo Biochemist

Unhappy with his experience in a commercial laboratory, Kendall accepted an offer to set up a new biochemical laboratory at Saint Luke's Hospital, New York, where he continued his work on the thyroid. At Saint Luke's, Kendall found the closer association with physicians and patients that he felt was necessary for his research on medical problems. He suffered a setback when Saint Luke's Hospital ran out of funds for his research. In 1914 he wrote to Louis B. Wilson, the chief of the Laboratory Division of the Mayo Clinic, and was offered a position as biochemist at the Mayo Clinic, where he found that several members of the medical staff were intensely interested in thyroid disease. Surgery was then a well-established treatment for the goiters produced by hyperthyroidism, or Graves' disease.

The Discovery of Thyroxin

From the work of Eulgen Baumann, a German scientist, Kendall was aware that a unique feature of thyroid tissue was its high iodine content, and he knew the thyroid hormone would contain iodine. Less than a year after renewing his work at the Mayo Clinic, Kendall succeeded in isolating the pure crystalline thyroid hormone, containing 65 percent iodine, to which the name thyroxin was given. His discovery was made by a fortunate accident. After preparing an extract of thyroid tissue in ethanol, he inadvertently left it in his laboratory for several hours while the ethanol evaporated, leaving a pure crystalline form of thyroid hormone. He reported his accomplishment in May 1915 at a meeting of the Association of American Physicians.

Nobel Prize Winner

Kendall would go on to become a world-renowned hormone chemist at the Mayo Clinic. His work with Dr. Philip S. Hench on the "Compound E" hormone, which they renamed cortisone, enabled rheumatoid arthritis cripples to walk again and would win them the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1950.

Sources:

James Bordley III and A. McGehee Harvey, Two Centuries of American Medicine, 1776-1976 (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1976);

Tyler Wasson, ed., Nobel Prize Winners (New York: Wilson, 1987).