Regulation and its accidents
Regulation and its accidents: 7 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Guideline That Took Four Years to Write
A European medicines document with a long reference number became the rule on 1 June 2026. The story of why it was needed, how it was drafted in public, and the boundary it quietly draws around everything else.
The Sweetener That Waited Sixteen Years
Aspartame is a dipeptide with a methyl group on its end, found by accident in 1965 and not cleared in the United States, for dry goods, until 1981. Its regulatory history is a case study in how agencies decide, disagree and decide again.
How a Substance Becomes a Controlled One
A molecule can be entirely lawful on a Monday and a scheduled substance by Thursday, with no new experiment performed in between. Scheduling is an administrative act, and understanding it as an act rather than a finding explains almost everything about how the lists behave.
The Category Nobody Designed
Four words on a label — For Research Use Only — now carry an enormous amount of weight in a market their authors never imagined. They were written in the 1970s to solve a narrow problem about diagnostic test kits, and they have never been rewritten.
The Compounding Pharmacy Question
Making a medicine to order is the oldest thing a pharmacist does, and for most of history it was the only thing. How that ancient practice acquired a modern statute — written in 2013, after an outbreak that killed more than sixty people — and what happened when it met a national shortage of the best-selling drugs on earth.
The Elixir That Wrote the Drug Law
In September 1937 a Tennessee company dissolved a new wonder drug in something very close to antifreeze and shipped it across America. More than a hundred people died, and no law had been broken. Almost everything about how medicines are approved today was assembled afterwards, out of the wreckage.
When a Regulator Names a Product
On 8 July 2026 the Greek medicines agency published a notice about intravenous preparations being sold as food supplements. It made the evening news. Understanding what such a notice is — and, more importantly, what it is not — is one of the more useful literacies available in this field.