Bovine Insulin Synthesis

I would like to correct an error in the article “Chemistry at Peking University Turns 100” (C&EN, Aug. 2, page 46). The photo caption on page 49 states that, although the chemical synthesis of bovine insulin was done in 1965 at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry and Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, the achievement was not published until the 1980s. This is not true.

I was in Vincent du Vigneaud’s laboratory at Cornell Medical College, and we read the article published in Scientia Sinica in 1966 (15, 545). The article also was known to the Stein and Moore group, the Craig group, and the Merrifield group next door at Rockefeller University, because we all read it and discussed it with great interest. It was outstanding work and was well-known by chemists in the West, at least those of us in peptide and protein chemistry, and we knew some of the people who did the work.

Victor J. Hruby
Tucson