Dear Sir, Somatostatin (SRIH) was discovered because of its surprising inhibitory effect on GH secretion (1), and thus appropriately named. Later on, its ubiquitousness and the inhibiting activity on pancreatic hormones and on other types of hormones, rendered its name too restrictive. It was by then too late to change it. Veber and his group at Merck succeeded in reducing its size, from 14 down to 6 amino acids without apparent loss of activity (2). Bauer and his team at Sandoz developed the octapeptide octreotide (3). Other octapeptide analogs followed with the development, inter alia of vapreotide (4) and lanreotide (5). When it was recognized that somatostatin was binding to 5 distinct receptors, most analogs of potential clinical usefulness were classified accordingly to their affinity to such receptors. It became apparent however, that none of them had the same broad spectrum of receptor affinity of the natural hormone, but rather than accepting this as a limitation, virtue was made of it in the name of selectivity. If Leonardo was a painter, an architect and experimented with a bird-like contraption, Picasso was more imaginative, Frank Lloyd Wright built earthquake-proof buildings and the Wright brothers’ contraption did actually leave the ground, but Da Vinci remains unique… Apart from being more resistant to metabolic degradation, were the “more selective” analogs that much better than SRIH (6)? The trend today for peptide and peptide-mimetic chemists is, on one hand, to continue to make “more selective” analogs (7), and on the other to really mimic SRIH by broadening their receptor affinity (8), a novel refreshing approach. Enter cortistatin (9) this orphan cousin of somatostatin in search of a receptor of its own. Now it appears to have, at least in the rat, somewhat better GH inhibiting activity than SRIH (10) and to occupy the ghrelin receptor, which SRIF cannot do (11). Are some of the known somatostatin analogs also cortistatin analogs? Should we be looking for selective cortistatin analogs, acting only on the ghrelin receptor? If and when found, they will represent a new class of GH inhibiting substances.