The story

Glutathione was first found in 1888 by the French scientist J. de Rey-Pailhade, who called it philothion. Frederick Gowland Hopkins at Cambridge isolated it in 1921 and named it glutathione, and its three-amino-acid structure was settled in 1935 by Harington and Mead. Alton Meister at Cornell mapped the gamma-glutamyl cycle that makes and recycles it. Russian physiology treats glutathione as the central regulator of the thiol-disulfide balance in the body, and it is used widely in Eastern Europe and Asia, especially Japan and Korea, by injection for liver and skin.