Although HGH as a hormone was discovered a long time ago, it was only relatively recently, that scientists were able to extract this hormone safely, and improve upon the means of delivering this hormone to the human body in a safe manner. Back in the fifties, the only way to extract human growth hormone was from…..human corpses.
It’s not pleasant to hear, but that was the case. And just to obtain a few drops of this precious hormone required extraction from the pituitaries of thousands of dead human brains…and you would be sure those cadavers were from Third World countries. Factories of commercial drug manufacturers extracted the hormones through a kind of pasteurization process.
This method was just a time bomb waiting to explode..
After some of the children with growth problems received this hormone, they showed rapid improvement, but then came a new plague – Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD. It’s also known as mad cow disease and kills its victims by destroying their brains… Although this is a rare disease, after a few children came down with this disease…the FDA cancelled the distribution of the drug, since it was obvious the virus had somehow latched onto the hormones being given to those children. Back then in the 1980s, understanding of HGH was minimal, and no precautionary measures were taken. By 1991, HGH sourcing from cadavers was already stopped altogether.
Hormones are composed of proteins and proteins are composed of amino acids. HGH is actually the largest block or group of proteins bound together as one with 191 amino acids, existing in our bodies. Synthesizing it was no small feat…but it had to be done…and in 1985 the US Congress passed a law called the Orphan Drug Act to give anyone who developed drugs for rare conditions an exclusive right to patent and market the drug all for themselves. The race was on to synthesize HGH from scratch.
Two companies came out with patents for HGH, Genentech and Eli Lilly. Genentech was first in 1985, and should have been given exclusive rights, but because their HGH creation was lacking in one amino acid, meaning it was 190 amino acids (but still a full working version in the human body)…Eli Lily could challenge that and they did come up with a full 191 amino acid version of HGH that was identical in every way to original HGH. After a court battle, both companies were awarded rights to manufacture and sell the drug, and other drug companies were shut off from a piece of the pie…
Pure growth hormone at that time was very expensive (till today), and both the companies that developed synthetic HGH reaped huge profits. In 1987, the treatments cost about $30,000 a year. Today, a years worth of growth hormone treatment costs around $10,000, assuming you are able to obtain them from low cost clinics safely, and legally.
These days, HGH therapy is no longer restricted to children with growth problems; it was inevitable that aging adults soon started seeing the huge benefits of growth hormone supplementation, and HGH usage has increased ever since.
