BEGINNER GUIDE
A Short History of Peptide Research
Peptides aren’t a 2020s fad. Here’s the century-long story — from the first hormone discovered in 1902 to the lab synthesis that made modern research peptides possible.
It started with a mystery in 1902
The story begins with digestion. In 1902, British physiologists William Bayliss and Ernest Starling found a substance the gut released into the blood to signal the pancreas. They called it secretin — and it was the first hormone ever identified. That hormone turned out to be a peptide. Starling later coined the word "hormone" itself.
This was a revolutionary idea: that the body coordinates itself using tiny chemical messengers carried in the blood. Every modern peptide concept traces back to this insight.
1921 — insulin changes everything
In 1921 in Toronto, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin, the peptide hormone that regulates blood sugar. Within a year it was saving lives. Insulin remains the most famous peptide in medicine and proved that a peptide could be a therapy, not just a curiosity.
Insulin also taught researchers how fragile peptides are — it has to be injected rather than swallowed, because digestion would destroy it. That single practical lesson still shapes how research peptides are handled today.
1953 — the first peptide built from scratch
Understanding a peptide is one thing; making one is another. In 1953, American biochemist Vincent du Vigneaud chemically synthesised oxytocin — a nine-amino-acid hormone — the first time a peptide hormone had been built in a lab and shown to match the natural molecule. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1955 for it.
For the first time, researchers could produce an exact, pure peptide sequence on demand rather than extracting trace amounts from tissue.
1963 to now — synthesis goes industrial
The breakthrough that created the modern field came in 1963, when Bruce Merrifield invented solid-phase peptide synthesis — a method of building a peptide one amino acid at a time on a tiny bead. It automated peptide-making and earned Merrifield the 1984 Nobel Prize.
That method, refined over decades, is why a research lab can order a precise, HPLC-verified sequence today. If you want the mechanics, our guide on how peptides are made walks through it in plain language.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The first hormone ever found — secretin, 1902 — was a peptide.
- Insulin (1921) proved peptides could be life-saving and revealed how fragile they are.
- Oxytocin (1953) was the first peptide hormone synthesised in a lab.
- Merrifield’s 1963 solid-phase synthesis made modern research peptides possible.