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The Nobel Duel
A cautionary tale about the competitive pressures of scientific research, and how they alter the course of history.
The endocrinologist tasked with summarizing the presentations, Roy Greep, was clearly unimpressed by the lack of progress in actually isolating and characterizing CRF, writing: “never before to my knowledge, except for the monster of Loch Ness and the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, has the existence of hypothetical objects been indicated by so much imposing circumstantial evidence.” Using newly developed analytical methods (including NMR and mass spectrometry) over a three-year span, Burgus had amassed enough data to conclude that TRF was in fact a peptide, and that histidine, glutamic acid, and proline made up at least 80 percent of it. Building upon Burgus’s results, Guillemin ordered the Swiss chemical company Hoffmann-La Roche to synthesize all six possible tripeptides containing histidine, glutamic acid, and proline, as well as versions of these peptides with an acetyl group attached to the N-terminus.
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