Ovaries Secrete Male Hormone

The three paired abdominal glands, the kidney, the suprarenal gland, and the gonad arise in the embryo from a common fold which later serves to retain the urinary and genital primordia to the dorsal body wall. It is well known that groups of adrenal cortical cells (which may originate as part of the suprarenal primordium) are often found quite distant to the location of the definitive suprarenal gland, at times so far removed as to be incorporated in the adult testis. Since discovery of the androgenic function of ovaries', , 8.9 and a partial analysis of that function as it pertains to mice,2'8 5 6 and because of the proximity of origin of the definitive ovary and the adrenal gland, the following questions present themselves. Do adrenal cortical cells descend from their site of origin to be incorporated in the adult ovary? If so, do these cells retain their normal function? These questions are posed in part by the extraordinary Similarity of the appearance of cells in the ovary which has been grafted into the ear of a captrated male mouse to those cells in the adrenal cortex of the normal mouse. Some cells in such grafted ovaries have 'been called "lutein like"8 because of their general duster arrangement and histologic appearance; other cells, individually or collectively, as seen in grafted ovaries bear a striking resemblance to the cells found in the cortex of a normal adrenal gland. It may be noteworthy that a greater number of cells in a grafted mouse ovary resemble suprarenal cortical cells than is the case in a nongrafted ovary. The physical change caused by grafting, with its attendant environmental differences (temperature, blood supply, confined space, etc.), produces a change in the histological appearance of ovaries and in part, at least, in their physiology (androgenicty of