The first syntheses
The first syntheses: 6 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Greek Chemist and the Group That Came Off Clean
In 1932 a young chemist from the Peloponnese helped solve the problem that had stopped Emil Fischer. The protecting group he co-invented shaped peptide chemistry for three decades, and the school he built in Athens carried the work into the age of insulin.
The Chemist Who Named the Bond
Before anyone could build a peptide, somebody had to decide that proteins were chains, that the links were all the same kind of link, and what to call them. Emil Fischer spent the last twenty years of his life proving it, one laborious dipeptide at a time.
The Hormone Found by Looking for Something Else
For years two laboratories hunted the brain signal that tells the pituitary to release growth hormone. What kept turning up instead was a signal telling it to stop — and the wrong answer became a diagnostic tool, then a drug class, then a whole receptor family.
The Longest Chain Anyone Had Built
Thirty-nine amino acids does not sound like much now. In the middle of the 1950s it was a wall — and the way round it turned out to be the discovery that most of the molecule did not matter.
The Nine Amino Acids That Won a Nobel
In 1953 a laboratory on the East Side of Manhattan worked out the order of nine amino acids in a pituitary hormone, built that order from bottled chemicals, and found the result behaved exactly like the real thing. Everything the field has done since walks out of that room.
The Three-Way Race to Make Insulin
By the end of 1963 three laboratories on three continents were building the same protein from bottled chemicals, and none of them could agree on who had finished. What they were really testing was whether a protein could be made at all.