Introduction
With the development of the RIA (Yalow & Berson, 1960), endocrinologists entered the mainstream of biomedical research, and over the years they have maintained their position by adapting biochemical and electrophysiological techniques for use in their particular endocrine cell type. Now they have gone one step further and embraced the discipline of molecular biology. Thus, in recent years, endocrinologists have identified genes and mRNAs within their cells by Southern and Northern blotting, transfected cells with cDNAs encoding particular proteins to characterize protein function, and introduced mutant cDNAs into cells to identify sequences of a protein which are necessary for its function. Of particular interest is the antisense oligonucleotide strategy of selectively depleting cells of individual proteins, a technique which has been applied to many non-endocrine cell types (reviewed by Colman, 1990; Neckers & Whitesell, 1993). So far the antisense oligonucleotide approach has not been used widely in endocrine cells,
