Page 69 - The Miracle of Hormones

The Rhythm Of Life:
The Thyroid Gland

this: these two molecules were created for
this common task.
You will recall from earlier pages that
the growth hormone is the molecule that
orders the cells of a developing child to
grow and multiply. This hormone stimu-
lates the cells to grow in both size and
number. But there is another very impor-
tant detail that must be planned—the
speed of cell division. Thyroxine influen-
ces the speed of cell division during the
period of growth, ensuring complete
development of the body.
To understand the importance of thy-
roxine, we just have to look in a mirror. So
long as there is no birth defect, every individual's mouth, nose, eyes, the
face—in short, everyone's whole body—has a proportion that resembles
that of almost everyone else. The body has this proportion due to the per-
fect functioning of the thyroxine hormone that God created. If you were
reading these sentences years ago as a young person in your developing
years, and the thyroxine molecules did not go to each one of your indi-
vidual cells and inform them of the speed at which they must divide,
your body's organs would have developed without proportion. You
could even have become mentally impaired, as is the case when cretin-
ism occurs as the result of insufficient secretion of thyroxine immediate-
ly after birth. The bodies of people afflicted with this condition lack
proper proportions when grown; generally they have very short legs and
a large skull. In addition, a lack of thyroxine also causes dwarfism. 15
Most of the people you see in your daily life (your schoolmates, fel-
low workers, people in the street, and your family) have bodies perfectly
shaped by God's creation by means of the activity of two small molecu-
les—growth hormone and thyroxine. These hormones are secreted at the
right time and in the right amount, commanding trillions of individual

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