The people behind the molecules
The people behind the molecules: 5 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Biochemist and the Blue Copper Tripeptide
A farm boy who sold his books to join the Army spent fifty years on a molecule three amino acids long. The route he took it down — thesis, wound-care company, device clearance, skincare jar — is the route most research findings take into the bathroom cabinet.
The Chemist Who Gave GLP-1 a Week
A hormone the body destroys within minutes had defeated a generation of drug developers. A chemical engineer at a Danish insulin company kept it alive by borrowing a trick from insulin, argued against the grain about what it was for, and shared a Lasker Award for it.
The Man Who Found a Hormone in a Gland Everyone Ignored
A young biochemist helped name the thymosins in 1966, turned a calf-thymus extract into something a regulator would let near sick children, and pulled the first defined peptide out of it. The medicine it became is sold in dozens of countries — just not the one where it was found.
The Moscow Institute That Made Peptides for the Mind
Two Russian peptides now come up for debate before American regulators. They were built in the 1980s at a Moscow institute that took an idea from a Dutch pharmacologist, fixed its fatal flaw with three amino acids, and then spent decades working out why its own medicines did what they did.
The Scientist Whose Name Came Late
In the 1980s a peptide chemist in Boston worked out which fragment of a newly read gene was the real hormone. Her name then went missing from the patents, the retellings and the prizes, and it took her the better part of three decades to put it back.