Glands and hormones: the insulin, heparin and ACTH taken from cetaceans

There was a time when treating a diabetic meant having a pancreas to hand. Not a laboratory: an organ, taken from an animal, processed quickly before it degraded. Cetaceans supplied them, and not only pancreases.

The age of animal hormones

Until the 1980s and the arrival of genetic engineering, all hormones for medical use came from slaughterhouse animals. There was no way of making them, only of extracting them, and industrial quantities of organs were needed for a few grams of finished product.

A whaling station that processes tens of thousands of tonnes of animal per season is, from this point of view, a source of raw material like any other. The glands were therefore removed, frozen and shipped to the pharmaceutical industry. The documented organs are the pituitary, the pancreas and the thyroid.

Whale insulin

Insulin extracted from cetacean pancreas was indeed used as a medicine, particularly in Japan, where its use was the subject of scientific publications in the 1960s. There it sat alongside insulin obtained from fish.

The context explains it: Japan had a considerable whaling fleet and a fishing industry, and therefore access to marine pancreases that other countries did not have. Elsewhere, insulin came from pigs and cattle.

Animal insulin was replaced only in the 1980s, by recombinant human insulin produced by modified bacteria.

A chemically different heparin

This is the most curious case, and it carries a scientific interest that goes beyond the subject.

Heparin is the reference anticoagulant, still today obtained from animal organs, essentially from pig intestine. It has been extracted from whale lung and intestine, and compared with that of cattle and pigs.

The analyses showed a difference in kind, not merely in degree. Land mammals produce what is called an alpha heparin; the whale, a marine mammal, produces an omega heparin, markedly less sulphated and with a different optical rotation. Two variants of the same molecule, separated by the return to the water.

The observation never led to a standard medicine, porcine heparin being available in quantity and thoroughly characterised. It remains a record of what was being sought in these animals at the time.

The pituitary and ACTH

The pituitary, a small gland lodged beneath the brain, governs a large part of the endocrine system. Its extracts have been used therapeutically since the 1950s, in particular for corticotropin, ACTH, prescribed for an impressive range of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions: multiple sclerosis, lupus, nephrotic syndrome, sarcoidosis, rheumatoid arthritis, infantile spasms.

Here too, the raw material came from slaughterhouses and, marginally, from whaling stations. The pituitary of a great whale is an organ of appreciable size, which made it an attractive source at a time when tens of thousands of glands were gathered to produce a single batch.

What this says about whaling

These products never represented a significant tonnage, and they did not motivate a single voyage. Their interest lies elsewhere.

They show how far the complete utilisation of the animal went, described on our pages devoted to whale meal and to bone and teeth. A whale did not yield one product, it yielded a dozen, from the coarsest to the most refined, and each one made the next voyage a little more profitable.

They are also a reminder that twentieth century medicine was built on animal organs, and that biotechnology did for pharmacy what petrochemistry had done for lighting: it made the animal superfluous. Once again it was a technical substitute, and not a decision to protect, that closed this outlet.

This page is part of our dossier on whale products.