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Mojsov’s story raises thorny questions about the scientific enterprise, including how credit is apportioned and how award decisions are made. Several in the obesity and diabetes field—including those being celebrated for GLP-1—express unease with her near-total absence from the narrative. But few have come forward to advocate for her place in that story.
“I think it’s a question of integrity” for people to speak up, says Mojsov, now in her early 70s. “I still don’t understand how I was excluded.”
MOJSOV CAME TO Rockefeller’s graduate program in 1972 from Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, where she got her undergraduate degree in chemistry. She recalls her room—a single—in a Rockefeller dorm as luxurious. “You look out on the garden, it’s green, very beautiful,” she says.
Mojsov was drawn to the lab of Bruce Merrifield, a renowned chemist who later won a Nobel Prize for his efficient method of synthesizing bits of protein called peptides. In Merrifield’s lab she focused on glucagon, a hormone released by the pancreas that acts as a check on insulin. Whereas insulin lowers blood glucose, glucagon raises it, and scientists thought suppressing glucagon might help treat type 2 diabetes. Testing that idea required a steady supply of glucagon, and others had struggled to synthesize it by the method that Merrifield had pioneered. “People said it can’t be done,” says chemist George Barany, who was also in the Merrifield lab and is now at the University of Minnesota. “Svetlana got it to work.”
- SVETLANA MOJSOV
- ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY
Barany and Mojsov shared an office and struck up a friendship that has endured for 50 years. “She’s just so kind and humble and curious,” Barany says. He helped Mojsov with her English as she wrote her dissertation and the two became scientific “confidantes,” he says. Both loved opera and ballet and sometimes ran into each other at performances.
During graduate school Mojsov also met her husband-to-be, immunologist Michel Nussenzweig, then immersed in medical school at New York University and a Ph.D. program at Rockefeller. He would bring her cups of tea to alleviate the stress of dissertation writing, Mojsov recalls. As his training ground on, she mastered glucagon synthesis and stayed in Merrifield’s lab as a postdoc to refine her techniques.
In the early 1980s, Nussenzweig was offered a medical residency at MGH. Mojsov was recruited to join the endocrine unit there as an instructor. She also became head of a new facility that would synthesize peptides for the unit’s scientists. Filling these orders “was not really a very time-consuming job,” Mojsov says, allowing her to pursue her own research. She was given one lab bench and could afford just a single technician, but Mojsov knew what she wanted to study: a still-mysterious peptide called GLP-1.
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MOJSOV CAME TO Rockefeller’s graduate program in 1972 from Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, where she got her undergraduate degree in chemistry. She recalls her room—a single—in a Rockefeller dorm as luxurious. “You look out on the garden, it’s green, very beautiful,” she says.
Mojsov was drawn to the lab of Bruce Merrifield, a renowned chemist who later won a Nobel Prize for his efficient method of synthesizing bits of protein called peptides.
Her work paved the way for blockbuster obesity drugs. Now, she’s fighting for recognition
Svetlana Mojsov helped discover the hormone GLP-1. Why has she been excluded from its history?
- 8 SEP 2023
- 5:40 PM ET
- BYJENNIFER COUZIN-FRANKEL
