The human body has 30 trillion cells whose activities are coordinated in cycles of almost mind-boggling complexity. Hormones are among the most key and ancient ways that the body coordinates life. Like the shouts a quarterback gives moments before a play is run, a miniscule amount of hormone is enough to launch complex choreographies of activities in a wide variety of cells. Hormones control the most crucial of life functions that vary over a day (such as digestion and water balance), month (fertility), or over the course of a lifetime itself (e.g., growth of different parts of the body from conception onward, this way and that, with typical outcomes if errors occur).

Through lecture and with some discussion, this course will cover the discovery of key hormones, where in the body they are produced, the roles for which each are known, and their regulation. Besides metabolism, growth, and fertility, we will learn that hormones have roles in regulating our salt and water balances, blood pressure, memory, mood, and immune defenses. We will see that hormones usually need to act together with other hormones to be effective (as with the various sex hormones), and as in the story of Goldilocks, their amounts and duration need to be just right; examples from medicine will show the effects of too much or too little, too soon or too late. Hormones are so important to life that hormones seen throughout the animal and plant kingdoms have human analogues.