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The sweet smell of the urine of diabetics was first noted in the 17th century by the Oxford physician, Thomas Willis.
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Attempts at treatment began when no more was known about diabetes than the polyuria, or mass production of urine. John Rollo, Surgeon-General to the Royal Artillery treated a patient by dietary restriction in 1706.
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Claude Bernard discovered that the liver stored glycogen and secreted a sugary substance into the blood. He assumed it was this substance that caused diabetes. At that time it was thought that the nervous system controlled secretary organs. This led him to a second discovery, that pricking the brain stem in a conscious animal caused temporary diabetes.
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In 1879, Von Mering, a German physician, disproved Bernard’s liver theory when he found that removing the pancreas caused diabetes. He and his partner, Minkowski, worked on extracting an antidiabetic substance from the pancreas but could not find a way to do this.
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The story of the triumphant discovery of insulin took place in 1921 in Canada by Fredrick Banting. After many failures, the group prepared an extract from the atrophied pancreas of a dog. They then isolated two other dogs with diabetes, administered the extract to one, and nothing to the other.
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From Connaught in Toronto and from Eli Lilly, of Indianapolis, IN, with whom the researches collaborated to produce insulin in the United States and Latin America.
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Insulin was crystallized by J.J. Abel
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August Krogh of Denmark found that everyone was talking about insulin. When he returned home he laid the foundation for the Danish insulin manufacturing industry and Nordisk Insulin Company.
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Protamine zinc insulin was introduced.
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Lente insulins were introduced.
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Its composition, two chains of 51 amino acids linked by disulphide bridges, was discovered by Fredrick Sanger of Cambridge.
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The scientific investigation of diabetes was improved by the technique of immunoassay by Solomon Berson and Rosalind Yalow in 1957. Minute concentrations of insulin can be consistently measured, a huge improvement on the previous methods of bioassay.
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The three dimensional structure of the insulin molecule was discovered 14 years later in Oxford by Dorothy Hodgin.
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On January 11, 1922, a 14-year-old boy became the first human patient to receive insulin made by Banting and Best.
This failed, but purified injections developed by Collip were given starting January 23, 1922.This time, the patient’s blood glucose levels dropped. News spread all over the world
