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Howard Jones, the test-tube baby pioneer who died at the age of 104, once told me that when he was a medical student in the 1930s, he started a sex club.
This was Johns Hopkins University, so sex club meant once-a-week meetings with about a dozen other students and a faculty advisor poring over Sex and Internal Secretions*, a 911-page textbook. The book started with insect mating habits and climaxed with human sexuality.
I was thinking about these Hopkins folks when I read a recent study—also coming out of Hopkins—about estrogen and the immune system. About 75 years ago, Jones and his buddies were reading that estrogen made girls girls. Ever since then, we’ve learned that sex hormones exude more power than we ever imagined.
The new study, reported in The American Journal of Physiology—Lung Cellular and Molecular Reports, sheds light on the way estrogen feeds the immune system, pointing to a specific estrogen receptor that may explain the hormone’s anti-viral powers. “Other studies have shown that estrogens have anti-viral properties against HIV, Ebola, and hepatitis viruses,” said Sabra Klein, the lead investigator. Klein’s team studied cells retrieved from the noses of men and women. She drenched the cells with a mix of flu virus and estrogen. Among the women, the hormone-virus combo minimized the viral load compared to the cells exposed to virus alone. That suggested the estrogen somehow helped dampen the flu. For men, the hormone-infection didn’t do anything.
It’s been reported that the study explains why women are less likely to get the flu, but that makes no sense. According to statistics within the report, women get hit harder (mortality rates among young women during the 2009 HINI epidemic were more than double among women compared to men). The researchers also note that estrogen levels fluctuate, particularly among pre-menopausal women, so you’d have to time the flu exposure according to your cycle.
What does this all really mean? Well, it could mean that if you are a woman on the birth control pill (that contains estrogen), you may ward off pregnancy and the flu at the same time. And it could point to new kinds of drugs to prevent viruses. But the real news is the sheer joy of the basic science of it all. The more doctors study how hormones interact with our immune systems, the more we will understand the complexities of our hormones truly control us. And how we may be able to control them.
As for Jones’s sex club, his interests may have appeared purely intellectual—recruiting students to read endocrinology, that is—but he also once shared a little secret with me. He started the club to get a girl—Georgeanna Seegar, a fellow Hopkins student and one of the few women in medical school then. Lo and behold, the two started dating shortly after the launch of the club, wed the day after they finished their residencies, and were married for 66 years until Georgeanna died in 2005, at the age of 92. Jones lived on for another 10 years, dying at the age of 104 this past summer. He slowed with age, but was mentally sharp, as his daughter told me, until he took his final breath.
*If you want to read what the Hopkins' students circa 1934 read, you can read all about it in Allen, Edgar, ed., Sex and Internal Secretions, The Williams and Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1934.
