My Life and Work
When I was young, there were 21 Protestant ministers in the family, mostly in the Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB) in small farm towns in Minnesota. The most distinguished, in a worldly sense, was Reuben Mueller, who moved the EUB into the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church.
Another family member who inspired my personal journey was Russell R. Boehlke. Boehlke worked for many years as an ophthalmologist, dedicated to helping others including those in developing lands.
The overall message from the family was that each person should have a mission in life.
At 18, I was drafted into the military. I could have avoided the military by getting a deferment to work on the family farm, but I would have joined the assault infantry to get off the farm. So I enlisted to be trained in an occupation where I could later earn a living.
But why did I focus on aging and health? Well, penicillin and insulin were two molecules that fascinated me. For two weeks when I was 10 years old, I was bedridden with a serious and painful streptococcus throat infection. A physician drove out to our farm and gave me a shot of penicillin and in two hours all the pain vanished. Also, older adults talked of the slow and painful deaths of young people with juvenile diabetes before insulin was used. But after four months working at a research laboratory, I realized how difficult it would be to discover a new molecule that would help in treating of difficult human diseases. So I did what our family's ministers always recommended and prayed to God to lead me to a new miraculous health molecule. This was GHK which I isolated in 1973.
All in all, over the past 60 years, my work has gone better than expected. And the use of GHK for cosmetic skincare has become established.
I've always said that one of my goals in life is to make every woman look as young as her daughter.
Skin Biology's Approach to Anti-aging Cosmetics
You know that if you take care of your body, it will take care of you. You want younger-looking skin, vibrant hair and strong, healthy-looking nails. You don't have time for cosmetic fluff and trickery. You believe that an effective cosmetic product should not be damaging to your skin. You want a cosmetic line that can finally produce results.
Our products have been tested by independent laboratories and have been classified as non-irritants, non-allergens, non-carcinogenic, and non-poisonous. Skin Biology's specialized water/oil creams do not contain any detergents. For this reason, they are always close to returning to a water phase and oil phase. These creams are formulated to avoid opening and damaging your skin barrier.
Skin Biology avoids the following:
- Formulations and moisturizers that are designed to push water into the skin, wet the outer skin proteins, and "puff up" the skin to make wrinkles and creases less obvious. The problem with such products is that they loosen and wet the skin, damage the skin barrier and permit easier access by bacteria, viruses, and allergens.
- "New chemical entities", that is, synthetic molecules that the human body has never been previously exposed to in our history. It requires decades to determine the safety of such molecules such as in the case of PCBs and DDT.
- Plant extracts are often over-hyped. Products such as stem cells from apples, grapes and melons make claims that are rooted in fantasy. Medical research involving stem cells uses stem cells from people, not plants. If plant stem cells work as anything, it is only as an antioxidant.
- Collagen-inducing peptides that act like Transforming Factor Beta 1 (TGF-beta-1) are some of the most controversial substances in skin care. TGF Beta 1 is one of a group of cytokines that signal skin cells to proliferate. While they effectively plump wrinkles, they also cause damage to hair follicles which results in hair loss.
- Human-derived growth factors which are byproducts of medical procedures.
- Hyaluronic acid (hyaluronan) because it plays a critical role in the spread of cancer cells.
- Ingredients used as nerve inhibitors such as botox used to relax muscles to reduce wrinkles. Long term cosmetic use of such ingredients may inhibit nerve function in the brain and other areas of the body.
- Dyes and coloring agents. Most dyes are labeled FD&C; the colors are derived from coal tar.
- Regarding the color of copper peptide serums, many products on the market are pale blue or completely clear. These products are not authentic copper peptide products, but fakes. Any solution of 0.3% copper peptide or higher should be bright blue. Many GHK-Cu products are fake or heavily diluted but are dyed to camouflage this fact.
Timeline:
1938: Born in Winona, MN.
1956-1959: Navigation Equipment Specialist. US Army Electronic Proving Ground, Fort Huachuca, AZ.
1960-1962: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, BA Chemistry & Mathematics
1963-1964: Graduate studies at Atherosclerosis Research Laboratory, University of Minnesota. Studied control of fibrinogen synthesis in humans and animals.
1965-1967: Sansum Foundation, Santa Barbara, CA. Found an impurity in blood albumin that suppressed fibrinogen synthesis.
1969-1973: University of California, San Francisco, PhD Biochemistry. Isolated GHK from human blood as the active factor controlling fibrinogen synthesis and supporting replication of cultured cells.
1974-1978: Continued work on GHK at UCSF.
1979-1984: Benaroya Institute, Seattle, WA. Studied GHK's copper connection & discovered Skin Rejuvenating Copper Peptides.
1985 – 1991: Barbara Weinstein and I started ProCyte Corporation. Directed research on GHK. Took ProCyte to NASDAQ. ProCyte was later merged with another company.
1994-Present: Charlene Pickart and I founded Skin Biology. Continued development on GHK and developed 2nd generation Skin Rejuvenating Copper Peptides.
