HGH was discovered in the 1920's, and was thereafter largely ignored.

In the late 1950's HGH resurfaced. Endocrinologist Maurice Rabin, at the New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, began treating a growth stunted child with injections of HGH.

The child, whose body was not able to produce its own HGH, then resumed growing. This pioneering work of Dr. Rabin's set the stage for HGH. More doctors began employing this therapy to treat children with growth deficiencies, with the same wonderful result. Then came tragic news.

The HGH used to treat these children had been obtained from Africa, extracted from the brains of cadavers. Unhappily, the process by which the hormone was extracted from the pituitaries in these brains, also extracted an element that had previously infected some of these brains. It was the Prion that caused CreutzfeldtJacob disease. And it was this hitch-hiking Prion that led to the tragedy, just as a similar element led to the "mad cow disease" controversy in Europe.

During the 1950's in the United States, seven children of the 5,000 who had undergone this HGH extraction treatment contracted Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. The expected incidence would have been from 1:100,000 to 1:1,000,000. The treatments were discontinued and the FDA banned the use of this extraction.

It is, however, rarely an ill wind that blows no good at all. With the benefits of HGH already apparent, and with the original source of HGH lost, drug companies were spurred on to find a way of synthesizing HGH in the lab. Given the potential benefits of HGH, with even more being foreshadowed, the U.S. Government offered incentives to this end.