Model Organism began in the winter of 2021 at a corner table in the reading room of the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor. Claire Havlicek had spent six years as a histology technician — embedding, sectioning, and staining rat tissue for other people's studies — and had recently left the bench. Marcus Webb was a science writer who had been assigned, and then un-assigned, a magazine piece about the online enthusiasm around research peptides. They knew each other from a methods seminar both had audited, and they had arrived at the same irritation independently: every accessible article either of them could find about compounds like BPC-157 was written by someone selling it.
The papers themselves told a different and more interesting story than the marketing did — a story about rats and mice, about small groups and unblinded scoring, about findings that had lived for decades inside a single laboratory's output without anyone outside it checking. But that story existed only in journals a general reader would never open, behind paywalls and terminology. The gap between what the literature said and what the internet said about the literature was, they decided, an actual public problem. Somebody should just describe the studies. Plainly. With the species named.
The first version of this publication was a shared document the two of them passed back and forth for three months, which slowly became the first three explainers. The rules that now govern the site were written in that document's margins before the site existed: name the model organism in the first paragraph; say what is missing before saying what was found; never assert a result from a paper neither of us has read. Priya Raman, who had left a pharmacology PhD program with a half-finished dissertation and a fully finished skepticism about how preclinical statistics get used, joined in 2022 after emailing a four-paragraph correction to the second explainer. It was a good correction. We published it and then hired her.
The decision that shaped everything else came early: no advertising, ever. A publication about compounds that people sell cannot take money from anyone adjacent to selling them and expect to be believed — and a publication that exists to describe evidence gaps cannot survive an incentive to make anything sound exciting. We remain small, independent, and reader-supported, and the arrangement suits the work.
Model Organism exists to give general readers an accurate, plain-language account of what preclinical peptide research shows and what it does not. We describe the published animal-model literature honestly — including its gaps, its biases, and its distance from human evidence — and we sell nothing.
What we cover. Published, peer-reviewed preclinical research on peptides — primarily rodent studies, along with the cell-culture work that underpins them. We summarize study designs, reported findings, proposed mechanisms, and the methodological quality of the evidence. We cover the history and sociology of this research where it matters: who did the work, whether anyone independent has repeated it, and how a literature's shape can mislead.
What we deliberately do not cover. We publish nothing about dosing, preparation, or administration of any compound, in any species — including the animal studies' own dosing details, which we omit on purpose. We publish nothing about sourcing, vendors, or product quality. We publish nothing about human use of these peptides: no anecdotes, no self-reports, no practical guidance of any kind. These are not oversights. Almost none of these compounds have been through rigorous human trials, which means no one — not us, not anyone — can make evidence-based statements about their use in people. Writing as if we could would betray the entire point of the publication.
Why we hold the line. Because the line is the product. The moment a publication about preclinical evidence starts gesturing toward application, it stops being a description of the literature and becomes a recommendation wearing a lab coat. Our value to readers depends on never making that trade.
Editor
Claire spent six years as a histology technician in two university pathology labs before moving to writing, and still thinks in tissue sections. She edits every explainer for one question above all: would the scientists who did the work recognize this description of it?
Research Editor
Priya left a pharmacology PhD program four years in, taking with her a deep familiarity with rodent study design and a durable suspicion of p-values that arrive in convenient places. She owns the evidence snapshots and writes most of our methodology coverage.
Contributing Writer
Marcus is a science journalist whose work has covered replication, retraction, and the strange afterlife of preclinical findings on the internet. He co-founded the publication and writes the explainers that require the most patience with the archive.
We get things wrong, and when we do we want to know. If you find an error of fact, characterization, or emphasis in anything we publish, write to corrections@modelorganism.org. Substantive corrections are made in the text, noted on the affected page with the date, and acknowledged to the reader who caught them. Sharp readers are the cheapest peer review there is, and we treat them accordingly.