DR. OZEMPIC

I was just a baby scientist when I discovered the hormone that made Ozempic possible. I had no idea how life-changing-and world-changing-that breakthrough would be.

- DANIEL DRUCKER

IT'S NOT OFTEN that I find myself in a room with some of the world's biggest celebrities. But there I was, this past April, dressed in a tux and receiving the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for my role in the discovery of GLP-1, a metabolic hormone that is also the active ingredient in Ozempic. It's wild to think that something I started working on in a lab in Boston in the 1980s-my first real job after medical school-led me to the so-called Science Oscars. Unlike most other science galas, where you're lucky to get a decent meal, this ceremony is very swanky. It's held in Los Angeles and attended by bold-face names from the tech world (Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin) and from Hollywood (Gwyneth Paltrow, Jodie Foster, Lizzo). Per strict instructions from my daughter-in-law, I got selfies with Paris Hilton and Katy Perry.

I received the award alongside fellow GLP-1 experts Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen and Svetlana Mojsov. It was presented to us by Will.i.am and Lauren Sánchez, who made a joke about how a lot of people in the room owed us a debt of gratitude. That got a big laugh.

Over the course of the evening, attendees kept coming up to me to share the success they'd had with GLP-1 medications.