Who publishes this, and why

In the spring of 2020, Nadia Bergeron and Priya Raghunathan were emailing each other links. Nadia had spent six years in a university histology core preparing slides for other people's papers and had developed a specific irritation: the write-ups often sounded more certain than the sections had looked. Priya had been covering agricultural field trials, where a promising result at one station routinely evaporates at the second, and had started noticing the same structure in a completely unrelated corner of biology.

What they kept finding was that almost every readable piece of writing about peptides studied in animals had been produced by someone with something to sell. The primary literature was there and was mostly fine. Between the papers and a curious reader there was nothing except marketing.

They started a shared document. It was meant to be notes. By the following winter it had become four long entries, written mostly at the Rochambeau Library reading room on Hope Street because it had good tables and nobody there wanted anything from them. Those four entries are still the spine of the Library, revised many times since.

In the second year the question of money arrived, as it does. Two supplement companies offered sponsorship within a month of each other, one of them generously. Turning them down was not a difficult decision on the merits and was a difficult decision on the arithmetic, and it set the funding model that still applies: the newsletter is free, there is no advertising, and the publication stays small enough to survive that.

In 2022 we ran a correction that cost us a contributor. A piece had described a rodent finding as replicated on the strength of two papers that turned out to share a senior author. The contributor who wrote it did not think the correction was warranted, we ran it anyway with the original text left standing above it, and he stopped writing for us. We would run it again. It is the clearest thing we can point at when someone asks what the editorial standards below actually mean in practice.

What we cover

Published preclinical research on eight peptides: work in rodents, work in other laboratory animals where it exists, and work in cell culture. Alongside that we cover the methodology underneath it, which in practice means study design, statistical power, blinding, replication, and the publication history of specific claims.

We write for an intelligent general reader who wants to know what the literature says and how much weight it will bear. We assume no specialist training and we do not simplify to the point of distortion.

What we deliberately exclude

Dosing, in any form. No amounts, routes, schedules, cycles or timing. A dose that appeared in a rat study is a parameter of that study, not guidance, and printing it converts a literature summary into an instruction sheet no matter what disclaimer sits beside it.

Sourcing, preparation and handling. No suppliers, no purity or testing claims, no reconstitution or storage information, no prices. We have no relationship with anyone who sells these compounds and no interest in helping anyone find them.

Human use. We do not publish personal accounts, forum reports, self-experimentation, or before-and-after anything. Those are not evidence, and treating them as evidence is the specific failure this publication exists to avoid.

GLP-1 receptor pharmacology. Out of scope by design, and named here only so the boundary is unambiguous. That field has a large human trial literature and extensive mainstream coverage, which is the opposite of the situation this publication exists to describe.