Insulin Discovery Quotes

With insulin, the stone was rolled away, and diabetes became a matter of the quality of life, not the speed of death.

A story about the Jack Spratts of medicine [was] told recently by Dr. Charles H. Best, co-discoverer of insulin. He had been invited to a conference of heart specialists in North America. On the eve of the meeting, out of respect for the fat-clogs-the-arteries theory, the delegates sat down to a special banquet served without fats. It was unpalatable but they all ate it as a duty. Next morning Best looked round the breakfast room and saw these same specialists—all in the 40-60 year old, coronary age group—happily tucking into eggs, bacon, buttered toast and coffee with cream.

Insulin was now not only readily available, but also affordable. George Walden's improved methodology also allowed Eli Lilly and Company to reduce the price per unit several times after its introduction. Although Eli Lilly held the exclusive franchise of insulin production in the United States, the company was committed to keeping the price as low as possible so that it would be available to all diabetics.

By the end of 1923 the cost of treatment per patient was frequently less than one dollar per week and seldom more than two dollars

Banting’s initial idea was neither original nor successful, but he persisted in it, and his persistence led to a solution that was both original and successful. He would later say that if he had been more familiar with the literature on the subject and had known about the previous attempts, he would not have pursued his idea at all. Fortunately [..] for millions of children, he knew next to nothing.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Insulin falls to extremely low levels. Blood sugar increases, but the hallmark of this condition is severe weight loss. Type 1 diabetes has been described since ancient times. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a renowned ancient Greek physician, wrote the classic description: ‘Diabetes is... a melting down of flesh and limbs into urine.’ No matter how many calories the patient ingests, he or she cannot gain any weight. Until the discovery of insulin, this disease was almost universally fatal. Insulin levels go waaayyy down. Patients lose a lot of weight.

Diabetes And Lifestyle The inactive lifestyle leads to loss of muscle mass that may cause insulin resistance because our bodies are meant to be physically active. For thousands of years we led an active lifestyle, and it is only for the past 100 years or so we have got somewhat sedentary. We addresses the root cause of the disease & corrects metabolism through the approach of Ayurveda.

Surely this is truth stranger than fiction, or it is the truth that makes fiction plausible.

By contrast, the first determination of the exact amino-acid sequence of a protein by Sanger”—the sequencing of bovine insulin between 1949 and 1955—“was absolutely essential. One could not even have begun to think seriously about the genetic code until it had been revealed, to begin with, that a protein is beyond the shadow of doubt a polypeptide in which the amino-acid residues really are arranged in a definite, constant, genetically determined sequence—and yet a sequence with no rule by which it determined itself. So that therefore it had to have a code—that is, complete instructions expressed in some manner—to tell it how to exist, you see. Suppose that instead Sanger had found—and that’s what many biochemists would have guessed, in those days, that he would find—that there were general rules of assembly, that a polypeptide was made of a repetitive sequence of amino acids, for example lysine, aspartic acid, glutamine, threonine, repeated however many times. Then that would have been a chemical rule”—of the kind that governs the assembly of sugars into monotonous polysaccharides, for example—“and so you didn’t need a genetic code. Or you needed only a partial code. But Sanger’s discovery, since it revealed a sequence that had no rule, where—” The sequence was full of information, I said, nowhere redundant, no part of it predictable from other parts. “Exactly,” Monod said. “And so to explain the presence of all that information in the protein, you absolutely needed the code.

At sixteen, Michael was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and given twelve “treatments” of insulin shock therapy; this entailed bringing his blood sugar down so low that he lost consciousness and then restoring it with a glucose drip. This was the first line of treatment for schizophrenia in 1944, to be followed, if need be, by electroconvulsive treatment or lobotomy. The discovery of tranquilizers was still eight years in the future. Whether