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Insulin is a natural hormone made by the pancreas that controls the level of the sugar glucose in the blood. Insulin permits cells to use glucose for energy. Cells without it cannot utilize glucose.
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If scientist hadn´t discovered that patients who died from diabetes often showed pancreas damage, Paul Langerhans couldn’t have found that the pancreatic tissue produces digestive juices and substances that regulated the sugar glucose.
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If Oscar Minkowski in collaboration with Joseph von Mering hadn’t removed the pancreas from a healthy dog to test its assumed role in digestion, they wouldn’t have established the real link between pancreas and diabetes.
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If Charles Best hadn’t introduced the name “insuline” for this hypothetic substance that reduced the hyperglycemia and glycosuria in dogs made diabetic by the removal of their pancreases, we wouldn’t have known as it.
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If Insulin hadn’t been discovered, diabetes would have been a feared disease that most certainly leads to death.
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If Frederick Banting, a Canadian surgeon, hadn´t had the idea that the pancreatic digestive juices could be harmful to the secretion of the pancreas produced by the islets of Langerhans (insulin-producing beta cells), he wouldn’t have discovered and described its physiology.
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If Frederick Banting and Charles Best hadn’t given a few injections a day of pancreatic extract into the diabetic dog, they wouldn’t have proven that pancreatic extract really works.
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If Banting, Best and Collip hadn’t worked to purify the insulin, it wouldn’t have started testing in humans and Leonard Thompson wouldn’t have chosen as the first person with diabetes to receive insulin.
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If insulin hadn’t been success, the Nobel Committee wouldn’t have decided to award Banting and Macleod the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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If Banting and Best hadn’t worked and discovered the insulin, the University of Toronto wouldn’t have established the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research that has a long successes researching in the importance of dietary choline and the development of heparin as an anticoagulant.
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Although insulin doesn’t cure diabetes, if physiologists hadn’t discovered it, people with severe diabetes couldn’t have lived an almost normal life.
