AUTOTRANSPLANTATION AND REGENERATION OF THE ADRENAL GLAND

It is well known that a functional graft of an adrenal gland is a mass of regenerated cortical tissue (1–7). Medullary tissue does not regenerate, although Wyman (8) found chromaffine tissue, identified by appropriate stains, in two cases of cortical transplants. Neither the extent of degeneration of an adrenal graft nor the source of regenerated cortex has ever been carefully studied. Pencharz, Olmsted and Giragossintz (6) transplanted adrenal cortex to the ovaries of rats, and included some illustrative data on degeneration and the cortical regeneration which followed. Wyman and Walker (9) have shown that removal of the capsule from the gland was unfavorable to its successful transplantation. Wyman and turn Suden (10) showed that the size of regenerated cortical fragments depended on the number of fragments which survived after grafting. According to them, if 4 fragments were grafted to pockets in the abdominal musculature and 2 failed to survive, the regenerated fragments would be larger than any one fragment would have been if all 4 had survived (10). Some inhibitory mechanism, within the organism, appeared to limit the size of the regenerating fragments. Since these earlier studies were concerned more with the physiologic activities of the restored graft than with its cytology, we undertook to study the process of cortical regeneration. If the capsule is essential for successful transplantation (9) does cortical regeneration depend on the capsule? Will the enucleated portion of the gland survive and regenerate when grafted without the capsule, or will the capsule, when grafted alone, cause regeneration of a gland? How does the presence of one intact gland affect the regeneration of a singly transplanted gland?