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JOURNAL OW CHEMICAL SDUCATION JANUARY, 1929
FEEDING IODINE TO SHEEP* Research often succeeds in devious ways in disclosing results far removed from its original intention and object. At the time when an American chemist was engaged in isolating from the glands of sheep that organic compound called thyroxin, a constituent of the thyroid gland, he found that different sheep possessed varying amounts. Also those sheep that possessed large quantities of thyroxin in the thyroid gland were heavy wool growers; the others were scrawny and no good for wool. The answer then was immediate. Physiologists have known for years that the thyroid gland regulates bodily and mental processes, metabolic rates, rates of chemical combination and productivity in the body, and how these could be stimulated. So the result of this research was that the sheep in Montana were fed iodine. Increased activity of the thyroid gland resulted and they became valuable wool growers. In direct relation to this is the necessity for its use in the human diet as a preventative of goiter. It is conservatively estimated that as high as 50 per cent of the school population in the northern half of the United States have incipient goiter, resulting from an abnormal condition of the thyroid gland. In regions of iodine deficiency artificial methods of supply must he provided; by iodization of public water supplies as is done in Rochester, N. Y., and Minneapolis; the use of iodized table salt as is enforced by law in the State of Michigan; the use of tablets or flour prepared from the iodine-rich extract of marine algae; and the inclusion in the diet of seafoods such as oysters and bluefish which contain appreciable amounts of iodine. *From the Industrial Bdletin of Arthur D. Little, Inc., April, 1928.
