REAL STORIES
Elizabeth Hughes Weighed 45 Pounds When She Got Insulin. She Spent 58 Years Keeping It Secret
Historical profile. When Elizabeth Hughes arrived in Toronto in August 1922, she weighed 45 pounds. She was 14, days short of her fifteenth birthday, the daughter of the sitting...
REAL STORIES
Sadaf Farooqi Treated One Girl Who Couldn’t Make Leptin. It Changed How Medicine Sees Hunger
Historical profile. In a report published in 1999, Cambridge doctors described a 9-year-old girl who weighed 94.4 kilograms, about 208 pounds. She had a...
REAL STORIES
Charles Best Was 22 When He Helped Make Insulin Work. The Nobel Went to Others, and the Story Got Rewritten
Historical profile. Charles Best was 22 years old when he began working in a University of Toronto laboratory in May 1921, helping a surgeon...
REAL STORIES
Werner Creutzfeldt and the Incretin Effect Behind GLP-1
Historical profile. Give a person glucose by mouth and their pancreas generally releases more insulin than it does when glucose is delivered intravenously to...
REAL STORIES
Douglas Coleman Stitched Obese Mice Together and Predicted Leptin Two Decades Early
Historical profile. Long before anyone could sequence a gene for appetite, Douglas Coleman did something that sounds crude today.
At The Jackson Laboratory in Bar...
REAL STORIES
A Dinner-Table Tip About Marie Krogh’s Diabetes Helped Start the Company Behind Ozempic
Historical profile. In 1922, a Danish physician named Marie Krogh attended a private dinner in the United States and heard news that would change...
REAL STORIES
A VA Doctor Went Looking in Gila Monster Venom. He Found the First GLP-1 Drug
Search for "Gila monster Ozempic" and you will find a tidy legend: a lizard's spit became the world's favorite weight-loss shot.
The real story is...
REAL STORIES
Svetlana Mojsov Found the Active Form of GLP-1. It Took Decades for Her Name to Catch Up.
Every weekly injection of Ozempic or Wegovy rests on a question that had to be answered in a laboratory first: which version of the...
REAL STORIES
Frederick Sanger Spent 12 Years Reading Insulin’s 51 Letters. Then He Won a Second Nobel
Historical profile. Every peptide medicine, from insulin analogs to semaglutide, depends on a simple chemical fact: the order of amino acids matters. Change that...
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...
