A testicular action was associated with circulating blood fractions - now thought as a family group of androgenic hormones - in the first focus on castration and testicular transplantation in fowl by Arnold Adolph Berthold (1803-1861). Research on the action of testosterone received a short boost in 1889, when the Harvard professor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817-1894), then in Paris, self-injected subcutaneously a "rejuvenating elixir" comprising an extract of dog and guinea pig testicle. He reported in The Lancet that his vigor and feeling of well-being were markedly restored however the effects had been transient, and Brown-Séquard's hopes for the compound had been dashed. Suffering the ridicule of his colleagues, he abandoned his focus on the mechanisms and ramifications of androgens in humans.
Source: increasing testosterone
In 1927, the University of Chicago's Professor of Physiologic Chemistry, Fred C. Koch, established quick access to a huge way to obtain bovine testicles - the Chicago stockyards - and recruited students ready to endure the tedious work of extracting their isolates. For the reason that year, Koch and his student, Lemuel McGee, derived 20 mg of a substance from a way to obtain 40 pounds of bovine testicles that, when administered to castrated roosters, pigs and rats, remasculinized them. The band of Ernst Laqueur at the University of Amsterdam purified testosterone from bovine testicles in the same way in 1934, but isolation of the hormone from animal tissues in amounts permitting serious study in humans had not been feasible until three European pharmaceutical giants-Schering (Berlin, Germany), Organon (Oss, Netherlands) and Ciba (Basel, Switzerland)-began full-scale steroid research and development programs in the 1930s.
The Organon group in holland were the first ever to isolate the hormone, identified in a May 1935 paper "On Crystalline Male Hormone from Testicles (Testosterone)". They named the hormone testosterone, from the stems of testicle and sterol, and the suffix of ketone. The structure was exercised by Schering's Adolf Butenandt, at the Chemisches Institut of Technical University in Gdańsk.
The chemical synthesis of testosterone from cholesterol was achieved in August that year by Butenandt and Hanisch. Only seven days later, the Ciba group in Zurich, Leopold Ruzicka (1887-1976) and A. Wettstein, released their synthesis of testosterone. These independent partial syntheses of testosterone from a cholesterol base earned both Butenandt and Ruzicka the joint 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Testosterone was defined as 17β-hydroxyandrost-4-en-3-one (C19H28O2), a solid polycyclic alcohol with a hydroxyl group at the 17th carbon atom. This also made it obvious that additional modifications on the synthesized testosterone could be made, i.e., esterification and alkylation.
The partial synthesis in the 1930s of abundant, potent testosterone esters permitted the characterization of the hormone's effects, in order that Kochakian and Murlin (1936) could actually show that testosterone raised nitrogen retention (a mechanism central to anabolism) in the dog, after which Allan Kenyon's group was able to demonstrate both anabolic and androgenic effects of testosterone propionate in eunuchoidal men, boys, and women. The period of the early 1930s to the 1950s has been called "The Golden Age of Steroid Chemistry", and work during this period progressed quickly. Research in this golden age proved that this newly synthesized compound-testosterone-or rather family of compounds (for many derivatives were developed from 1940 to 1960), was a potent multiplier of muscle, strength, and well-being.
Comments