I. Science in the Blood
My aunt Gertrude Elion[1] won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988. She developed drugs that changed what it meant to survive — the first chemotherapy for childhood leukemia, the immunosuppressant that made organ transplants possible, the antiviral that fought herpes, and a foundational role in creating AZT, the first drug widely used against AIDS. She did this without a doctoral degree, in an era when laboratories turned women away at the door. She simply refused to stop.
Elion is my maiden name. Science is not something I came to — it is something I come from. It is part of my cultural fabric, woven into how I was raised to see the world: as a place of questions worth asking, and answers worth proving.
I tell you this not to impress you. I tell you this so you understand that when I make a claim on this site, I will back it. Every one.
II. The First Time Cancer Came
When I was in college, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. While she was in treatment, she took me to an art exhibit — women with breast cancer, their stories told in images. It was there that I first learned that the San Francisco Bay Area had one of the highest breast cancer incidence rates among white women anywhere in the world.[2]
That exhibit stayed with me. Not as fear, exactly. As information. As the beginning of a question I am still asking.
III. The Second Time Cancer Came
Years later, I was diagnosed myself. I will not make this the center of the story, because it is not — what came after is. But I will say that the experience of moving through a medical system as a woman with questions is its own education. You learn, very quickly, which practitioners see you and which ones see a file.
I became a reader. Not a patient waiting for instructions — a person who needed to understand what was happening in my own body at the cellular level. That instinct, which came from my aunt and was sharpened by necessity, is the foundation of everything here.
IV. What Came After
I will not tell you what I do or do not use. That is not what this site is for, and it would not be responsible for me to conflate my personal choices with a research platform.
But I will tell you that I am sharper than I have been in a decade, that my skin is different, that something in my body has quieted down and let me be present again. And I want that for you — not my outcome specifically, but the possibility of yours.
V. Why I Built This
I look around at my friendships — women in their forties and fifties — and I see so much quiet suffering. Not dramatic suffering. The kind that gets normalized. The kind that gets called aging. The kind that gets treated with antidepressants and birth control pills and a polite suggestion to manage your stress.
Most of what exists about peptides online was built by men, for men. Young men, often, speaking with authority about a woman’s body with the confidence of someone who has never lived in one. I have no interest in that content. I have no interest in creating more of it.
Cell Rituals exists because I needed it and it did not exist. It is a place where the research is real, the citations are real, and the uncertainty is acknowledged — because pretending we know more than we do is its own kind of harm. The good, the unknown, and the not-yet-proven all live here, clearly labeled.
I built this as one woman talking to another. Find your own path. It is your body in the most profound sense. Give it the opportunity to tell you what it needs, what needs to change, and — most importantly — when it is better.
That moment is worth working toward.
— Leslie
Citations
[1] Gertrude B. Elion — Biographical. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988. nobelprize.org
[2] Keegan et al. (2007). Recent changes in breast cancer incidence and risk factor prevalence in San Francisco Bay Area and California women: 1988–2004. Breast Cancer Research. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov