In October of 2004, a group of women gathered in a small room at the Veteran’s Building in Culver City, California. They had all come to the annual conference on women’s health issues. Seated among the females in that small audience, one could find one, seemingly out-of-place man.

“Hormone therapy” was to be the focus of the lecture for which those women (and one man) had gathered. They were all eager to learn about menopausal hormone therapy. Yet they did not expect to hear a lecture about natural hormone replacement therapy.

The woman who gave the short presentation in that room was a molecular biologist. She knew how to use the tools of genetic engineering to manufacture special proteins. She also knew that research into hormone therapy for menopause had underlined the need for certain proteins, proteins normally secreted by one or more endocrine gland.

The lecturer skillfully explained to her audience the research tactics used in a molecular biology lab. She delivered a quick history of genetic engineering, the science that had allowed scientists to manufacture proteins in the lab. Thanks to molecular biology, pharmaceutical firms no longer have to extract all of their proteins from animal tissues.

In the late 1960s, a group of researchers at The Johns Hopkins University discovered something called restriction enzymes. Using those enzymes, researchers could insert any gene of interest into the DNA of a tiny organism. Then as that organism reproduced itself, it could reproduce the gene introduced into its DNA by the research scientists.

Suppose that researchers wanted to find a way to manufacture a hormone. They first needed to determine what gene coded for that hormone. Having done that, the researchers could then introduce that gene into the DNA of a bacterium or a yeast cell. As that altered organism divided, it would copy the inserted gene.

The organism with the altered gene would produce a new and different protein, the protein coded for by the inserted gene. If the inserted gene called for production of a hormone, the organism with the altered DNA would make that hormone. If the organism were able to make estrogen, then medical science would have a substitute for natural hormone therapy.

Those were the sorts of facts that that one October lecturer announced to the women in that small, Culver City room. She did not have time to highlight all of the benefits of the new tools now made available through molecular biology. She did not mention the extent to which the new tools reduced concerns about things like mad cow disease and bird flu.

Viruses and even smaller particles, things called prions, can live and grow in an animal. If an organ from that same animal is used to extract a hormone, then all who ingest such a hormone might contract the disease caused by that tiny organism. If a hormone can be manufactured in the lab, and if extraction procedures can be abandoned, then concerns about mad cow disease and bird flu surround only issues related to diet.