Pineal research: the decade of transformation.

In a little more than a decade (1954--1965), the pineal gland was demonstrated to be an active neuroendocrine transducer in contrast to a functionless vestige as earlier supposed. The two major contributions which laid the groundwork for the development of modern pineal science were Kitay and Altschule's book The Pineal Gland (1954) and Lerner's isolation and structural work on melatonin (1958). After Lerner's discovery, biochemists, anatomists, and physiologists determined much about the structure and function of the pineal gland. In 1965, Wurtman and Axelrod tied this earlier work together by characterizing the pineal as a neuroendocrine transducer.