Turning points
Turning points: 9 articles from Peptidesfact. Long-form reporting on peptide science.
The Hormone Harvested From the Dead
For twenty-seven years, from the first report in 1958, growth hormone for children came from human pituitary glands collected at autopsy. What ended the programme in 1985, what replaced it within months, and why the story is not quite finished.
The Man Who Proved a Protein Had a Spelling
Before 1955 nobody knew whether a protein was a definite molecule or a family of loosely similar ones. Frederick Sanger settled it for insulin with a yellow reagent, sheets of filter paper and a patience that took the best part of a decade.
The Receptor That Waited Twenty Years for Its Hormone
Most drugs are built to imitate something nature already made. In this case the imitation came first: a laboratory peptide, then its receptor, then, more than two decades after the first clue, the hormone the receptor had been waiting for. A discovery story told back to front.
From a Million Brains to a Usable Drug
Somatostatin was pulled out of the hypothalamus in 1973, did exactly what had been promised of it, and vanished from the bloodstream in about two minutes. Turning that result into a medicine meant throwing most of the molecule away.
The Assay That Made Hormones Visible
Before 1959, a hormone in a living person was something you could reason about but never weigh. Then a physicist and a physician in a Bronx veterans' hospital turned an inconvenient antibody into the most sensitive measuring device biology had ever had.
The Decades When Peptides Fell Out of Fashion
For roughly twenty years the pharmaceutical industry held a class of molecules that had already given medicine insulin — and largely walked away from it. Nothing about that decision was foolish, which is exactly what makes the return worth explaining.
The Hundred-Year Problem of Swallowing a Peptide
From the moment insulin existed, someone asked whether it could be a tablet, and for the better part of a century the answer was a flat no. The story of how that no was finally, partially, expensively overturned.
The Year the Obesity Drugs Worked
For half a century, obesity pharmacology was where careful people went to be disappointed. Then a trial reported a number that belonged, until that moment, to the operating theatre.
The Machine That Made Peptides Cheap
For a chemist in the 1950s, assembling a chain of nine amino acids was the work of years and worth a Nobel Prize. Then Bruce Merrifield fixed his molecule to a plastic bead, and the arithmetic of an entire field changed.