My below report depicts the history of diabetes with its miracle discovery of insulin used to control and prolong the lives of the 34.2 million Americans living today with Diabetes 1 and Diabetes 2. I found Amanda Foreman’s Wall Street Journal column fascinating in its explanation of the discovery of insulin a century ago. Foreman refers to this event as one of the “greatest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century.”
Our bodies need to run on glucose which is a type of sugar running through our blood stream to our cells where this sugar is used to form energy. Diabetic bodies are not able to produce the insulin hormone which regulates the processing of glucose and its storage in our cells. Without medical treatment, this condition becomes terminal.
Here then is a brief time line for the discovery of insulin:
1. First recognized around 1550 B.C. (some 4000 years ago) in a text written on The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical writing, it reports patients suffering from frequent urination, thirst, and weight loss.
2. The Sushruta Samhita, an Indian text, composed after the 7th century B.C., reveals the necessity of testing for diabetes (in certain questionable individuals) by “seeing whether ants were attracted to the sugar in the urine.”
3. (a. The ancient Greeks named it “diabetes,” their word for “siphon” or “pass through.” (b. The Greek’s 5th century B.C. physician, Hippocrates (the “father of medicine”), promoted exercise as part of the treatment.
4. The early Chinese suggested an unbalanced diet of rich, sweet and fatty foods possibly playing a strong role in the disease. They used a textbook case of an aristocratic woman who died in the 2nd century B.C. Her perfectly mummified body was rediscovered in southern China in 1971 and revealed “a life of dietary excess.”
5. As physicians became more knowledgeable in diagnosing diabetes, in the 1770’s the English doctor, Matthew Dobson, discovered that sugar stayed in the blood as well as in the urine.
6. In 1889, Oskar Minkowski, a researcher at the University of Strasbourg, then Germany, experimented on dogs to prove that a “non-functioning pancreas triggered diabetes.”
7. By the early 20th century, scientists (and doctors) knew “that a pancreatic secretion was responsible for controlling glucose in the body.” Canadian researchers, MacLeod, Banting, Best, and Collip worked on the topic, and Banting and Best in July, 1921 successfully injected insulin into a dog.
8. MacLeod and Collip then attempted to make a human-compatible version. They tried their insulin on a 14-year-old boy, named Leonard Thompson, who lived another 13 years.
9. The above Canadian research team/s sold their patent rights for only $1 to the University of Toronto, thinking that “insulin was too vital to be exploited.”
Amanda Foreman notes that “Their idealism was betrayed: Today manufacture of the drug is controlled by three companies, and according to a 2018 Yale study published in JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), its high cost is forcing 1 in 4 Americans to skimp on their medication.”
10. Foreman states “The next frontier for insulin is finding a way to make it affordable for all.”
Part 2: “Diabetes, the Disease” (next publication)
