Aroused by Randi Hutter Epstein

Author:Randi Hutter Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

The brain on the left is an image of a normal healthy brain; the brain on the right is a CJD-infected brain from cadaver-sourced growth hormone. Left image courtesy of Dr. William P. Dillon, University of California, San Francisco; right image courtesy of Peter Rudge, MRC Prion Unit at University College London.

On March 8, 1985, a group of growth hormone experts met in Washington, D.C. Most of them were skeptical. Many were angry. After all, they were talking about only one boy. They worried more about a national panic than a national epidemic. If fear spread needlessly, thousands of children could be deprived of crucial treatment—all because of one random death.

Dr. Robert Blizzard, who spearheaded the collection of pituitaries, remembers thinking that Hintz, a close friend of his, was reacting too quickly. One case doesn’t mean a trend, he said.

Blizzard, for his part, had given himself shots of growth hormone. When he was treating children with growth issues, the thing that struck him, besides their lack of height, was that many of them looked old. Their skin was wrinkled; their faces had lost cheek fat. Blizzard had wondered whether a lack of growth hormone made them age too fast. Then he had wondered whether shots of growth hormone could slow the aging process. Or better yet, could growth hormone reverse the clock? Unwrinkle your face? Restore hair color? In 1982—a few years before Ray Hintz sounded the alarm—he’d tried it on himself and corralled a few friends to do the same. They took one milligram every day. “I was on it for the full two and a half years, the other fellas for a year and a half,” Blizzard told me.

Blizzard monitored key metabolic indicators and measured bone density. He even studied the men’s fingernails. “I never put this into the press,” said Blizzard, “but I learned what I wanted to learn, which is that it didn’t make your hair turn from gray to black and the girls didn’t whistle at you.”

But the possibility of growth hormone killing children? Nonsense.

Carol Hintz, Ray Hintz’s widow, remembered those days well. (Ray Hintz died in 2014.) “It was a very difficult time,” she recalled. “Some of the endocrinologists were perturbed and thought he was stirring the pot. They just couldn’t believe it. Doctors would call him at home and say, ‘What do you think you’re doing? There’s nothing wrong here.’ Dr. Blizzard had used it on himself and he was fine and still going strong. Other people tried to say Joey was on drugs or something like that. My husband knew the family well and said it just wasn’t possible.”

One month after the experts convened, and one month after Blizzard pooh-poohed the notion of dangerous growth hormone, Blizzard got a call from a doctor about one of his former patients. A thirty-two-year-old man from Dallas, Texas, had died the same way Joey Rodriguez had: drunken gait and rapid descent into dementia. He, too, had been on growth hormone for years. His doctors had assumed he had a motor nerve disease, perhaps multiple sclerosis.

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