Deiodination of thyroid hormones. A 30 year perspective (Berthold Memorial Award Lecture 1994)

It is truly a great honor to be the 1994 recipient of the Berthold Memorial Award from the German Endocrine Society which met in Würzburg, March 2-5. I am especially indebted to Drs. Köhrle and Wuttke for their kindness in making our visit to Würzburg so enjoyable and educational. Professor Berthold was the first to demonstrate the effects of a hormone on phenotypic expression when he transplanted testes to a castrated rooster, restoring its masculine appearance and behavior (Figure 1) (Berthold, 1849). Since 1960, when I joined the laboratory of the late Dr. Sidney H. Ingbar at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory at the Boston City Hospital and Harvard Medical School, one of our major interest has been the peripheral metabolism of the thyroid hormones (Figure 2), especially the deiodination pathway (Figure 3). This review will be primarily based on our studies, although many other laboratories have made extremely important observations on thyroid hormone metabolism at the clinical, physiological, and molecular biological levels. I am indebted to many collaborators who have played major roles in many of the studies to be cited in this review. The principle colleagues are listed in Table 1. Since much of our work has been carried out simultaneously in rats, humans, and cell cultures, studies will be described under these three broad categories.