Victoria Song's Optimizer column for The Verge visits a black-tie peptide party that a trio of Gen Z venture capitalists threw aboard the World War II Liberty ship SS Jeremiah O'Brien, a venue she calls a deliberate nod to American industrial prowess and domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing. She reports HHS's interim policy allowing certain unapproved peptides for compounding, notes FDA career scientists haven't endorsed it, and questions how well sublingual peptide strips work.