[Nfb-krafters-korner] to the Diabetics

[Blindhands at aol.com]

January 23, 1922:
This comes from History.com
At Toronto General  Hospital, 14-year-old Canadian Leonard Thompson becomes 
the first person to  receive an insulin injection as treatment for diabetes.
Diabetes has been  recognized as a distinct medical condition for more than 
3,000 years, but its  exact cause was a mystery until the 20th century. By 
the
early 1920s, many  researchers strongly suspected that diabetes was caused 
by a malfunction in the  digestive system related to the pancreas gland, a 
small
organ that sits on  top of the liver. At that time, the only way to treat 
the fatal disease was  through a diet low in carbohydrates and sugar and high 
in
fat and protein.  Instead of dying shortly after diagnosis, this diet 
allowed diabetics to  live--for about a year.
A breakthrough came at the University of Toronto in  the summer of 1921, 
when Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best  successfully isolated 
insulin
from canine test subjects, produced diabetic  symptoms in the animals, and 
then began a program of insulin injections that  returned the dogs to 
normalcy.
On November 14, the discovery was announced to  the world.
Two months later, with the support of J.J.R. MacLeod of the  University of 
Toronto, the two scientists began preparations for an insulin  treatment of a
human subject. Enlisting the aid of biochemist J.B. Collip,  they were able 
to extract a reasonably pure formula of insulin from the pancreas  of cattle
from slaughterhouses and used it to treat Leonard Thompson. The  diabetic 
teenager improved dramatically, and the University of Toronto  immediately 
gave
pharmaceutical companies license to produce insulin, free of  royalties. By 
1923, insulin had become widely available, saving countless lives  around 
the
world, and Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in  Medicine.


Joyce  Kane
_www.KraftersKorner.org_ (http://www.krafterskorner.org/) 
Blindhands at AOL.com