Science Stories: Series 3 - Testosterone: Elixir of Masculinity

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Testosterone has been claimed as one of the most important drivers of human life – through the agency of sex and aggression. In the 19th century, Charles-Eduoard Brown-Séquard injected himself with extracts from ground-up animal testicles, and made startling claims for its rejuvenating properties and its ability to enhance virility. But the amount of testosterone derived from the injection was actually so small that it could only have been a placebo effect. Today synthesised testosterone is increasingly prescribed for the so-called ‘male menopause’; it’s also regularly used for trans men as they transition, as well as for some women with low libido. In ‘How Much Testosterone Makes You a Man’, Naomi Alderman explores how testosterone had been used and abused in the past. She considers the credits and deficits of its story, and asks what it can tell us about identity and masculinity.

Image: Stick men, BBC Copyright

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:15.0	I'm Naomi Alderman. This episode of Discovery from the BBC is the story of a moment in the history of a moment in the history of science. On August 2nd, 1848, a German zoologist Arnold Bertold decided to see what it was that made
0:39.4	Cockrel's Crow strut about and generally act like the cock of the walk. He began
0:46.1	very directly. He operated on six young cockrels and removed their testicles.
0:51.6	He left two of the cockwalls like that.
0:55.0	History doesn't record what happened to their testicles,
0:58.0	but they turned into ordinary capons,
1:00.0	castrated cockroals with which farmers were familiar. Of these animals, Bertold records that they were not aggressive, fought with other cockrels rarely and half-heartedly, developed a monotone voice, their combs and wattles became pale and underdeveloped,
1:17.2	their heads remained small. And the other cockrels? In two of them, Bertold re-implanted one of their own testicles inside their body cavity near the intestines.
1:30.0	In the other two, he swapped the testicles over implanting one cockrel's
1:35.3	testicle into the other's body. It made no difference. All four of these cockrels
1:41.2	developed as normal uncastrated fowls.
1:45.0	They crowed lustily, often engaged in battle, showed the usual reaction to hens.
1:50.7	Their combs and w wattles developed normally.
1:54.0	When he opened them up, Bertold found that the testicles had attached well inside their bodies,
2:01.0	but mostly weren't producing sperm. So there was something else those
2:06.4	testicles were making that preserved the maleness of the cockrels. Without
2:11.9	knowing it, Bertold had stumbled on both the science of hormones,
2:16.7	endocrinology and on the idea of a male hormone, testosterone. And he'd ignited the idea of an elixir of maleness, which is
2:27.6	still with us today. This is the story of testosterone, of how it was discovered, how it's been used and abused,
	...

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