Re: [HAPS-L] End-product inhibition

["John Cornell" <jccornell@xxxxxxxxx>]

To James and others,
James you wrote "I suppose one could
call the endocrine cell the 'integrating system', but that seems to me
to be stretching the term 'integrating system'".

I don't think that it is stretching it to call an endocrine cell an integrating center.  To be called a feedback system, information must be fed back to something.  That something is the "integrating center".  If an integrating center does not exist then there is no feedback, because the information is sent to something that does not exist.  Therefore by definition, all feedback systems must have an "integrating center".  It doesn't have to look like an integrating center. but it does have to function like one.  We should have no difficulty in accepting a cell as an integrating center, after all look at all the one celled organisms that carryout homeostatic functions.  I personally believe that a molecule can and does serve as an integrating center (end-product inhibition). 
John