40 Years of Silence - The Forgotten Female Scientist Who Paved the Way for the Ozempic Revolution
And her male colleagues who basked in her stolen glory
2021:
Picture it - three men bask in the glow of the Gairdner International Award for their groundbreaking work on GLP-1, the hormone powering the Ozempic revolution. It's their third award in four years, with whispers of a Nobel Prize on the horizon.
But in the shadows a fourth figure stands unacknowledged.
In these ever glittering halls of scientific achievement, shadows loom - tales of brilliance obscured, credit denied, and women’s legacies nearly erased from history. This is the story of Svetlana Mojsov, the forgotten co-inventor of GLP-1 who paved the way for the medical marvel that's now a household name: Semaglutide, better known as Ozempic.
It would take more than 40 years for the world to know the name behind the groundbreaking discovery that paved the way for a multi-billion dollar industry.
This isn't just another tale of overlooked brilliance. It's a gripping exposé of gender bias and the dark underbelly of scientific achievement.
“I don’t know if they erased me from the history of Ozempic for being a woman” - Svetlana Mojsov.
Mojsov's words cut deep and are a chilling indictment of a world where scientific truth is malleable and credit is currency.
How did the woman who unlocked a major key to treating diabetes and obesity end up stripped of recognition?
Rewind 1972:
This is when Mojsov’s story begins. She arrived in New York from Yugoslavia to attend Rockefeller University’s graduate program in chemistry, her mind ablaze with scientific curiosity. There was a lab Mojsov had her eye on run by the renowned chemist, Bruce Merrifield, who later won a Nobel Prize for his speedy method for synthesizing peptides.
In Merrifield's lab, Mojsov quickly achieved the impossible. She synthesized large quantities of glucagon, the gut hormone that counteracts insulin and is released when our blood glucose becomes too low, when others declared it couldn't be done. But this was merely the prequel to her magnum opus.
1980:
Mojsov was then offered a position at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She was in charge of synthesizing peptides for the various labs in the hospital. Although she had her hands full, Mojsov ensured she had enough time to pursue her own research. Armed with only a single lab bench and one technician, she decided to tackle the still mysterious Glucagon Like Protein-1 (GLP-1).
1982:
Svetlana came to know of this peptide from a neighboring lab led by an eminent endocrinologist by the name of Joel Habener. He and his team were working on a variety of hormones like glucagon using angelfish pancreases, pulled from the Boston Harbor. The team identified what seemed to be a rather large precursor protein that the body slices and dices to ultimately create glucagon. Within this precursor protein they were now calling pro-glucagon, was a string of amino acids that looked like glucagon, and so they named it Glucagon Like Protein-1 or GLP-1.
At that time, scientists thought glucagon could be an answer to treating Type 2 Diabetes, but Mojsov wondered whether GLP-1 and not glucagon could be the key to the Type 2 diabetes conundrum.
It was thought that GLP-1 might have something to do with regulating blood glucose levels in the body, but its exact genetic sequence had never been found.
1982:
Previously, a team of researchers in California narrowed down the sequence of GLP-1 to a possible stretch of 37 amino acids within pro-glucagon. With computers not in full swing quite yet, Mojsov printed out a copy of the scientific paper with the DNA code for pro-glucagon and got to work.
Mojsov knew that hormones were usually hidden within a larger precursor protein and then were later “snipped” out at specific sites to reveal the true biologically active hormone. So, Like Sherlock Holmes, Mojsov searched for GLP-1 among this DNA alphabet soup.
As Mojsov recalls, “she instantly spotted a cleavage site that everyone else had missed” and marked where she thought the sites started and ended with a pen. She had just discovered the sequence for GLP-1, a short chain of 31 amino acids, Eureka!
She has kept that paper to this day for it would mark the rest of her scientific legacy.
But why was discovering this sequence such a big deal?
Well, for years the scientific community theorized about a “fabled” group of gut hormones called incretins that get produced after eating to stimulate the pancreas to release insulin. Mojsov realized GLP-1 was one of those incretins!
1984:
After working through her discovery, Mojsov finally designed an experiment to test her hypothesis in her shoebox lab and then this happened…
Whether it was pure coincidence or capitalizing on an opportunity, at Habener’s suggestion, a young postdoc named Drucker, approached Mojsov about a research collaboration.
Mojsov agreed, even though she had already done the majority of the legwork and continued to do so. Most of her time was spent teaching her methods to Habener’s lab. That being said, Mojsov was happy to collaborate with Habener and Drucker.
1986:
2 years later, Mojsov and Habener published their “co-discovery” of active GLP-1 found in amino acids 7-37 in a study that is now considered a landmark paper in endocrinology with Mojsov's name proudly leading as first author.
1987:
To put their study to the test, Habener contacted fellow endocrinologist, Gordon Weir, who had developed a rat pancreas model that could measure insulin levels minute to minute. Weir injected the pancreas with GLP-1 that Mojsov synthesized and watched the insulin levels. Like clockwork when GLP-1 went up, insulin went up. The two hormones were perfectly in parallel even at the tiniest dose proving that GLP-1 was in fact an incretin, a gut hormone that gets released after eating to release insulin.
The results of that study were published in 1987 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, listing three scientists: Mojsov first, Weir second, and Habener last. To this day Weir states that It’s “probably the most important paper I’m associated with.”
But here's where things took an unfortunate turn.
1990:
Mojsov moved back to New York and entrusted her colleague Habener with their patent filings. After a while, Mojsov reached out to Habener for a status check on the patents, but strangely never heard back from him. Years later Mojsov mentioned the patents in passing to a colleague, who told her that those patents were granted years ago.
1992:
Mojsov was shocked to see the patents were indeed granted and Habener listed as the sole inventor.
The betrayal cut deep, setting the stage for a legal battle that would drag on for years. But it was almost too late, Habener already licensed his patents to Novo Nordisk who would build empires off of Mojsov’s methods to develop Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs.
2003-2006:
The courtroom drama eventually ended with a hollow victory - Mojsov's name was added to four of five patents, with a third of the royalties going to Mojsov and the rest to Habener.
Justice served? Not quite.
2017:
With the legal case over, Mojsov decided to put this all behind her, but that was right when renewed interest in GLP-1 came back, but this time for obesity.
Around the same time, Habener, Drucker and Holst, who was part of the human GLP-1 studies, jointly won the Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine, “for their discovery of incretin hormones and for the translation of these findings into transformative therapies.”
Award after award rolled in for Habener and his colleagues, but Mojsov's name was consistently and conspicuously absent. The panels bestowing these honors claimed ignorance of Mojsov's role, despite her name leading several foundational papers and being the co-inventor of GLP-1 on multiple patents.
(To be quite honest, I struggle to even write “co-inventor”. From the timeline of research and interviews from Mojsov, it strongly appears that Mojsov largely conducted most of the foundational research and findings on her own. But, I digress.)
High-profile journals omitted Mojsov’s name and findings in subsequent papers over the years leading to a systematic erasure of her vital contributions.
"When a paper omits research that is relevant or that it was built upon, it has a snowball effect on future citations and research," Mojsov explains. “It's not just about recognition; it's about preserving the integrity of scientific progress. The key is to cite the primary papers. This isn’t a radical idea—it’s what I was taught in graduate school.”
Mojsov words are a stark reminder of how easily scientific truth can be distorted, rewritten, or simply forgotten.
Habener, when confronted, offered a tepid response: "I wish there was something I could do." But the evidence suggests there was much he could have done - but chose not to. Habener also denies Mojsov ever reaching out for the patents nor recalls the multiyear legal battle that ensued afterwards.
The story of Svetlana Mojsov and GLP-1 is more than a cautionary tale - it's a call to action. In a world where scientific truth is increasingly fluid, we must ask: who really writes the history of medical breakthroughs? And at what cost do we allow these narratives to go unchallenged?
2024:
In a turn of events that sent ripples through the scientific community, Svetlana Mojsov's decades-long struggle for recognition finally reached a triumphant crescendo.
Thanks to loyal colleagues, friends, and family who refused to let her groundbreaking work fade into obscurity, Mojsov is at last receiving the accolades she so richly deserves after 40 long years.
Time Magazine named Svetlana Mojsov one of their 100 Most Influential People. This prestigious acknowledgment marks a seismic shift from the days when her name was conspicuously absent from journals and patents.
In the end, Svetlana Mojsov's story reminds us all that while the arc of scientific recognition may be long, it can bend towards justice.