The results presented continue to be divisive. "There's been a tremendous turn-around by a number of prominent people in the field who are now looking at this concept very seriously," says senior author Ellis R. Levin, chief of endocrinology and metabolism at the Long Beach Veterans Affairs Medical Center and vice chairman for research in the department of medicine at the University of California, Irvine. Levin's group first suspected membrane effects when observing cellular events that, they believed, were far to rapid to occur via nuclear ERs--that is, via gene activation and protein product production in the nucleus. Many laboratories in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s had presented data suggesting the existence of membrane steroid receptors. "This kind of work didn't really get a lot of support," says Levin. "The people in that area had trouble getting their grants and their papers published."
Levin's group set out to devise a ...
