REAL STORIES
Bayliss and Starling Found the Secretin Hormone in a Dog’s Gut. Medicine Got the Word ‘Hormone’
By Grey Pepper Editorial
Every GLP-1 drug, every insulin pen and every peptide hormone test belongs to a medical world built around an idea so...
REAL STORIES
Adolfo de Bold Proved the Heart Makes a Hormone. Doctors Now Read Heart Failure in Its Peptides.
For most of medical history, the heart was understood primarily as a pump. Glands made hormones; the heart moved blood. In 1981, a pathologist...
REAL STORIES
Sérgio Ferreira Found Bradykinin’s Bodyguard in Snake Venom. It Became a Blood Pressure Pill.
By Grey Pepper Editorial
Historical profile. The jararaca is a pit viper of southeastern Brazil, and for most of the twentieth century its bite was...
REAL STORIES
Axel Ullrich Helped Put Insulin Genes Into Bacteria. Then He Followed the Receptor Into Cancer
Historical profile. Before recombinant human insulin became an ordinary pharmacy product, it was a race among a handful of laboratories to persuade bacteria to...
REAL STORIES
Roger Unger Insisted Diabetes Had Two Hormones, Not One. Today’s Obesity Drugs Target Glucagon Too
Historical scientist profile. No original interviews were conducted for this article.
For much of the twentieth century, the dominant explanation of diabetes centered on insulin....
REAL STORIES
Richard DiMarchi Swapped Two Amino Acids in Insulin. Then He Taught Peptides to Hit Several Targets at Once
Richard DiMarchi is a rare figure in metabolic medicine: a chemist whose scientific career connects a fast-acting insulin introduced in the 1990s with the...
REAL STORIES
Lotte Bjerre Knudsen Spent Decades Making a Fragile Gut Hormone Last. Ozempic Was the Result
Every blockbuster drug has a molecule at its center and, somewhere behind it, scientists who refused to abandon a difficult problem.
For the GLP-1 medicines...
REAL STORIES
Rosalyn Yalow Learned to Measure Insulin in a Converted Janitor’s Closet. Hormone Science Never Looked Back
Modern peptide medicine runs on numbers: insulin levels, hormone concentrations, drug exposure in the blood. It is easy to forget that, for much of...
