Edward Calvin Kendall.

Edward Calvin Kendall's family was professional: His father was a dentist, and his uncles were a physician and a clergyman. He was directed away from his first interest, physics, and into chemistry by his high school chemistry teacher in Stamford, Connecticut. At Columbia University, Kendall demonstrated the wisdom of this choice. After the statutory year of commercial research at Parke, Davis, and Co. in Detroit, Kendall moved to a clinical position at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. After three years, however, he decided that he preferred the laboratory setting of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His choice proved out quickly. Within his first year at the Mayo Clinic, working with abundant thyroid tissue from midwestern slaughterhouses, he isolated crystalline thyroxine, the iodine-rich hormone necessary for oxidation of the energy-producing small molecules produced by digestion in the mammalian body. For a decade or more, he tried to determine the chemical structure of thyroxine, but he was "scooped" in 1926 by C. R. Harington in England. After a few years spent isolating and determining the structure of the tripeptide yeast enzyme glutathione, Kendall turned to extracts of the adrenal cortex, a gland associated with the kidneys whose secretions were known to be related to animal metabolism. During the 1930's and 1940's, Kendall (as well as Tadeus Reichstein in Switzerland) isolated and demonstrated the structures of six hormones that Kendall called "Compound A" through "Compound F." These were of little clinical interest until Philip Showalter Hench tried Compound E in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. The effects were dramatic, and Compound E, renamed cortisone, quickly found applications in the treatment of rheumatic fever, allergies, skin and eye inflammations, various blood diseases, ulcerative colitis, Addison's disease, and hypopituitarism. INSET: Edward Calvin Kendall.