Lit Circle (Our Stolen Future) Ch 3-4

Quote Master (Ch.3-4)
pg. 32, "How, for example, could a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder play with a cat for hours while she was one personality and suffer violent allergic reactions to cats when she took on another." I think this quote was significant because the answer to that question lies in the topic or subject of chemical messengers. Alterations in one part of this system and have unforeseeable effects somewhere else because the system is interconnected.

pg. 33, "If hormones are vital to maintain proper functioning in adults, they are perhaps even more important in the elaborate process of development before birth." I believe this quote is significant because this theory of Vom Saal paved the foundation for the realization how small differences or fluctuations in contaminants which imitate hormones could also change development.

pg. 41, "Before the twentieth century, it was widely assumed that the sex of the baby was determined by environmental factors such as temperature." This quote was significant because more factors that determined sex were later discovered. For instance, Edmund Beecher Wilson and Nettie Marie Stevens discovered in 1906 that the number of X chromosomes determined sex due to the fact that they found that man has an X and Y chromosome, and women had two X chromosomes.

pg. 48, "Leading researchers and gynecologists hailed the man-made estrogen, known as diethylstilbestrol or DES, as a wonder drug with a host of potential uses." I believe this quote is significant because DES did not help pregnancies, but instead caused severe harm such as having uncommon or rare cancers to people were in the womb of their mothers who were treated with DES. It was definitely not a wonder drug.

pg. 49, "When the story of the thalidomide babies broke, it caused an international sensation." I think this quote is significant because DES caused infants without any legs or arms to be born to the world and it caused bad nightmares that the parents of those infants would remember for a lifetime. This comes to show what can go bad or wrong when the development hormonal control becomes rattled or agitated.