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Claude Bernard, a pharmacist, discovered that when cane sugar was injected into an animal's veins it was excreted in the urine, but when cane sugar was injected intravenously it disappeared. Bernard also discovered that even dogs on a pure meat diet still had sugar in their livers.
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Claude Bernard found that after washing the sugar in a liver, the liver was once again rich in sugar by the next day in dogs. He deduced that a sugar-forming, or glycogenic, substance must be present. Eventually Bernard isolated pure glycogen. This helped his theory that carbs are stored as glycogen and released as necessary. He believed the sugary substance that was released caused diabetes.
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German physician Von Mering disproved Bernard's liver theory by finding that diabetes occured after removing the pancreas. At this time scientists believed that an anti-diabetic substance might come from the islets of Langerhans (groups of pancreatic cells)
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American physicians Frederick Allen & Elliott Joslin promoted starvation dieting to treat diabetes. This was veiwed as the only possible treatment at the time and consisted of repeated fasting & prolonged undernutrition.
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Fredrick Banting discovered insulin by giving a adiabetic dog an extract from the atrophied pancreas of another dog. He used another diabetic dog as control.The control died within 4 days, but the dog receiving the extract survived until all the extract was gone.
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Banting & his assistant Charles Best administer insulin to a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson. However, results were questionable, since diabeticlifestyle.org said it failed, yet diabetes.org said that insulin saved Thompson's life.
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J.B. Collip, a visiting professor who observed Banting & Best's studies, began to develop purified injections of insulin, which were soon administers. They worked by dropping the blood glucose levels of patients. This insulin had to be injected twice daily, and became part of a painful treatment course that often resulted in abscesses.
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After severe shortages, insulin was being shipped commercially and used to treat diabetes.
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This was an attempt at longer-acting insulin.
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This option was simpler than using Benedict's solution because that option had to be mixed with urine and heated over boiling water.
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Fredrick Sanger of Cambridge received the Nobel Prize for discovering the composition of insulin, which had been first crystallized in 1926 by J.J. Abel. Sanger found that insulin consisted of 2 chains of 51 amino acids linked by disulphide bridges.
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Solomon Berson and Rosalind Yalow found that tiny concentrations of insulin can be consistently measured thanks to the technique of immunoassay. This greatly helped the investigation of diabetes and endocrinology in general.
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Hodgkin discovered the three dimensional structure of the insulin molecule and was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work.
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Today, many different types of insulin are available, They are most commonly injected or inhaled. People know today that insulin will not cure diabetes; it is still vital to consider side effects. However, thanks to modern medicine diabetes is no longer a death sentence and one can stil maintain a fairly normal lifestyle.
