Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Today, we're exploring one of

sleep sciences most puzzling stories, the curious case of delta sleep inducing peptide. It's a tale

that spans decades filled with promising discoveries, mysterious contradictions, and a twist

ending that nobody saw coming. Back in the 1970s, several sleep scientists were in many ways

seeking to be treasure hunters searching for the ultimate prize, something they called a sleep molecule. They were looking for a

natural chemical that could make anyone fall into deep sleep instantly. Imagine if you could

bottle up that irresistible feeling when you're so sleepy, you can barely keep your eyes open and then give that to someone

who couldn't sleep. That's exactly what they were hunting for. A team of scientists in Switzerland

claimed they found exactly that. They called it Delta sleep-inducing peptide. The name itself was bold,

like naming a racehorse champion before it ever runs a race.

It sounded like something out of a fairy tale, as if scientists had figured out how to capture

the sandman's magic and put it in a laboratory bottle. But as we'll see, this story is more

about what happens when scientists get swept up

in their excitement and don't ask enough tough questions.

This is a story about promising findings that other scientists couldn't repeat, confusing

results that should have been warning signs, and how the scientific community was slow to admit

they might have been wrong. What followed was a decades-long journey through thrilling

discoveries, puzzling contradictions, and mysterious dead ends. The path from discovery

to disappointment would teach the scientific world important lessons

about the dangers of overconfidence and the complexity of sleep itself.

Our story begins in Basel, Switzerland in 1977. Picture this. It's late at night in a laboratory,

and researchers are doing something quite unusual.

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