Modern peptide science began around 1900, when chemists started asking how proteins are built.
In 1901 the German chemist Emil Fischer, working with Ernest Fourneau, made the dipeptide glycylglycine. It was the first peptide made deliberately in a laboratory. In 1902 Fischer and Franz Hofmeister each argued that proteins are chains of amino acids joined through the same kind of link, which Fischer named the peptide bond. Fischer went on to build longer chains, eventually reaching a synthetic peptide of 18 residues.
At almost the same time, physiologists found that the body uses chemical messengers. In 1902 William Bayliss and Ernest Starling in London discovered secretin, a chemical messenger released by cells of the gut lining. Secretin later proved to be a peptide. In 1905 Starling introduced the word hormone to describe messengers of this kind.
Insulin came next. In 1921 and 1922, a team in Toronto isolated insulin, another peptide messenger. Frederick Banting and John Macleod shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.
Within about two decades, peptides had gone from a chemist's puzzle to a major topic in biology. Yet no one could yet see what these chains looked like or read their sequences. That challenge shaped the next era.
References
- NobelPrize.org, Emil Fischer: Biographical (1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
- Henderson J, The first 'endocrinologist', The Endocrinologist, Society for Endocrinology (2005, republished 2021)
- NobelPrize.org, The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923 (1923)
Educational content about laboratory research. Not medical advice. All Orion compounds are for laboratory research use only.
