Representatives of pharmaceutical firms are now gathering outside Yanagisawa's lab door. But whether orexins lead to improved treatments for eating disorders or not, the discovery is an impressive piece of scientific work. Other molecular biologists note that it took 10 years for researchers to learn as many details about neuropeptide Y. And in an accompanying article in Cell, Jeffrey B. Flier of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston hailed the study as nothing less than "a technical tour de force."

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