The story

This came out of one laboratory in the American southwest. Mac Hadley and Victor Hruby at the University of Arizona spent the 1980s asking what would happen if you made alpha-MSH survive in the blood, and their answer was the two-residue swap that produced NDP-alpha-MSH. Robert Dorr ran its toxicology; in 1991 Norman Levine's group published skin darkening in 28 men given ten injections under the skin over twelve days, with the peak colour arriving one to three weeks after the last dose and no darkening at all in those given saline. Pharmacokinetics followed in 1997, showing that under the skin it is completely absorbed and swallowed it is not absorbed at all. The Australian company Clinuvel then took the molecule somewhere unexpected: rather than tanning, they aimed it at erythropoietic protoporphyria, a rare inherited condition in which sunlight causes severe pain within minutes, and built the 16 mg slow-release implant. That became a specialist medicine in Europe and then the United States. The same implant has been put against vitiligo alongside narrowband ultraviolet light, where repigmentation came faster with it than with light alone. Meanwhile the loose powder version travelled a completely different road through gyms and the internet, and dermatologists in Europe have documented the consequences of that road.