Herbal Health

In 1921 Charles Best and Frederick Banting, both Canadians, came together in Toronto to work on an idea of Banting’s to try to isolate a substance from the pancreas of dogs that might be successful in treating diabetes. They worked in experimental laboratories in the University of Toronto, Department of Physiology.

Up to this time the problem was that the digestive juices also made by the pancreas tended to destroy the chemical substance that they were trying to extract. Their first stage was therefore to inactivate the part of the pancreas making digestive juices. They did this by tying the tube or duct leading from the pancreas to the intestines and this led to the degeneration of all the pancreas except the important islet cell tissues.

This pancreatic tissue they then ground up and extracted with fluids. This extract they then injected into dogs with diabetes.

The extract led to control of the diabetes in these dogs and the substance they had extracted they called ‘Isleton’ because it had been made from the islet cells. Later they changed the name to ‘Insulin’.

This happened in 1921, and during that eventful year they conducted many experiments to find out the best way to produce a potent and effective preparation of insulin which would be suitable for using on human patients with diabetes.

The first patient to receive insulin treatment was a boy called Leonard Thompson, who had developed diabetes two years earlier when he was 11 years old. He was now at the last stages of diabetes and was dying. He was given insulin that had been extracted from beef pancreas by Banting and Best’s method. As a result of this insulin, his condition dramatically improved and his diabetes was controlled. His life was saved, and a tremendous medical achievement was made. This demonstration of the success of the insulin in treating persons with diabetes led to the urgent work of finding a way to make insulin in large quantities commercially for the many diabetics requiring treatment. This was done, under Charles Best’s direction, in the Connaught Laboratories with the assistance and support of The Lilly Company of Indianapolis USA. So successful was this work that commercial quantities of insulin were being produced in 1922, the year after its first discovery.

One drawback of the early insulin was that it had to be given several times a day as it only acted for a few hours. Further research on insulin has been directed to perfect its production and to produce forms of insulin which have a prolonged action so that they need to be given only once or twice a day. Dr Hagedorn of Copenhagen in Denmark found that when insulin was combined with a protein chemical called protamine its action was prolonged. Further lengthening of insulin action has been achieved by combining this protein and insulin with the element zinc. Since then other research work has led to several newer and different forms of insulin with different ranges of activity. These different insulins make it possible for the doctor to choose a suitable insulin or combination of insulins to meet the varying needs of different patients.

Currently, research is going even further into the precise ways that insulin works to control the body’s use of glucose and fats and also to discover the basic cause of diabetes. When we know these things it may be possible to achieve one of our ultimate goals, which is to prevent people developing diabetes. We hope it will also lead to even better and easier ways of treating it.

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Tags: Diabetes

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