Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas. It helps to balance the level of sugar in the blood. Diabetes occurs when the body does not use insulin properly or does not make enough insulin.
A person with diabetes needs insulin to break down sugar into energy. Without insulin a person with diabetes would not have much time to live. For thousands of years, a diabetes diagnosis meant wasting away to a certain death.
Before the discovery of insulin, the only treatment that was given to diabetes patients was to put them on strict diets with a minimal carbohydrate intake. Even then, the prognosis was bleak.
In 1889, Oskar Minkowski and Josef von Mering discovered that when the pancreas gland was removed from dogs, the animals displayed symptoms of diabetes and died soon. This gave rise to the idea that the pancreas made a substance that prevented diabetes. This substance was named insulin by Sir Edward Albert Sharpey in 1910. In 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best harvested insulin from a dog’s pancreas and used this to keep another severely diabetic dog alive for 70 days.
In 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying from diabetes made a spectacular recovery when he received the first insulin injection in a Toronto hospital. Following this, mass production of insulin began and almost overnight, the prognosis for millions of people suffering from diabetes went from fatal to good!
While insulin is not a cure for diabetes, it helps to manage it. This medical discovery has saved and continues to save millions of lives worldwide.
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