Because of a curious division of labour amongst life scientists, the hormones of the adrenal medulla have traditionally been considered thepreserve of phar-macologists, whilst those of the adrenal cortex have been studied almost exclusively by endocrinologists or (more recently) by molecular biologists. This state of affairs is especially strange when one considers the importance of steroids and their syn-thetic congeners in clinical medicine: the glucocorticoids are by far the most potent and effective anti-inflammatory agents we possess and unlike the aspirin-like drugs, they are active against virtually every type of inflammatory disease. Asthma, pso-riasis, multiple sclerosis and the arthritides are all susceptible to glucocorticoid therapy-indeed it is often the only form of therapy that is effective in such diseases. Because of this unusually wide spec-trum of activity these drugs are extensively used with some 15million prescriptions being issued each year in the UK alone.

Another feature of the glucocorticoids which should endear them to pharmacologists is that they initiate their biological effects by combining with a soluble receptor, whose structure and function are well understood (indeed it is probably the best characterized of all receptors), for which a complete range of agonists, antagonists and partialagonists is available, and which at the very least could surely teach us a very great deal about the basic biology of drug-receptor interactions. How is it then that the field of glucocorticoid pharmacology has' fallen into such neglect? The reason, aswe shall see, seems to be connected with early ideas about the function of these hormones, and to a certain extent, with misconceptions about the nature of the inflammatory response itself. What-