The podcast Lost Women of Science released an episode on October 15 devoted to Svetlana Mojsov, the peptide chemist who identified the active form of glucagon-like peptide-1. Hosted by Katie Hafner and produced by Luke Malone and Elizabeth Corallo, it is the series' first episode about a scientist who is still living, and still arguing for her place in the record. The page carries a full transcript.
The chemistry will be familiar ground for APS members. Mojsov joined Bruce Merrifield's laboratory at The Rockefeller University in 1972, and as a graduate student took on the synthesis of glucagon by solid-phase methods, a target then widely held to be beyond a single pair of hands. She modified the standard protocol and made it. A decade later, at Massachusetts General Hospital, she set the newly reported GLP-1 sequence beside glucagon's and saw that the homology began at position seven, with an arginine at position six marking a site enzymes would cleave. She predicted that GLP-1(7–37) would be the biologically active species. Three years of antibody production and tissue assays followed, and the finding appeared in JBC in 1986 with Mojsov as first author; the JCI paper with Gordon Weir showing insulin release from the perfused rat pancreas followed in 1987. Those two papers underlie an entire therapeutic class.
What the episode documents at length is how thoroughly that contribution was obscured. Patents covering the use of GLP-1 to trigger insulin release were filed in 1990 naming only her senior colleague; it took a decade of effort to have her added as co-inventor, which the U.S. Patent Office finally did in 2004. Prize citations and review articles continued to describe her as a postdoctoral fellow in someone else's laboratory, when she had in fact directed the peptide synthesis core facility. As recently as 2023, a sweeping newspaper history of the GLP-1 drugs named the men and omitted her entirely.
Which is where George Barany enters, and stays. He and Mojsov shared an office in the Merrifield laboratory for the better part of a decade and have been friends and colleagues for more than half a century, and he is the most-quoted voice in the episode. He is also one of the reasons there is a corrected record to report. Learning in 2023 how little of the credit had reached her, he assembled a documented account of her contributions with help from colleagues in the field; that account reached Science, and an independent STAT investigation appeared three weeks later. He wrote to the newspaper that had left her out, asking for a correction. With Michael J. Barany he went on to publish a peer-reviewed account, Foundational contributions of Svetlana Mojsov to the GLP-1 field, in Exploration of Drug Science in 2024. The archival photograph of the 1976 Merrifield group that illustrates the episode comes from his files.
The episode reports that recognition has come quickly since, including a prize committee that added her name to an award for which she had never been nominated, and notes that she was not among this year's Nobel laureates. Mojsov's own account of what she has been after is the plainest line in it: "This is not about me getting prizes. It's about me actually not being erased from the scientific literature."
The episode runs about thirty minutes and is available on the Lost Women of Science site and through the usual podcast services.
