In the summer of 1921, Professor Frederick Banting discovered, along with his student Charles Herbert Best, insulin, the hormone that metabolizes carbohydrates and whose absence is the cause of diabetes.
The professor at the University of Toronto (Canada) received the Nobel Prize for this finding and the assistant ran out of him, but Frederick Banting shared it with Best.
Thanks to the work of both scientists discovering a substance considered among the most effective pharmacological products in the world, millions of human beings, diabetes ill, changed their death sentence for a normal existence.They went from having to die for diabetes to be able to live with diabetes.
It was a dog called Marjorie, on August 6, 1921 in Canada, the first diabetic animal in the world that received pancreas or insulin extract in its most primitive state to alleviate the deficit of this crucial hormone so that organism cells assimilate glucoseof blood, your food.From here to the test in humans, to industrial production and the Nobel Prize for the discovery, only a year and a half, an unusual record in medical science spent.
In December 1921, they tried the first essay in a person, but failed.On January 11, 1922, Leonard Thompson, 14 years old and diabetic since 12, received an injection of pancreas extract.After a treatment with a purified version of the primitive extract to eliminate toxic pollutants, a sensational improvement was achieved in the patient.Leonard was the first human being to whom the symptoms of diabetes with pancreas extract were eliminated.
Insulin is a hormone that secretes that area of the pancreas that is called Langerhans islets.Thanks to it, our body metabolizes carbohydrates.When missing, the proportion of glucose in the blood begins to increase, a fact that constitutes diabetes, a disease that affects 380 million people in the world.
It is precisely insulin that has transformed with its diabetes treatment the life of the patient.A 6,000 molecular weight substance - a peptide - considered the first known structure protein, which was worth the Nobel Prize to its discoverers, whose exact formula was determined much later, in 1953, it changed the lives of millions of people.Its effects on the organism - diminution of glycemia, increased permeability of cell membranes to glucose, stimulation of the metabolization of it, and helps the formation of glucose from glycogen - translate, in the language of theOrdinary life, to an overcoming of the diabetic crisis, to an extension of your life for years, for decades.
In addition to discovering insulin, there is talk of "Banting treatment" to refer to the treatment of obesity through a restricted regime, especially in sugar, flours and fats.Google dedicates his doodle today to Frederick Banting.It coincides that it is World Diabetes Day with the 125th anniversary of the scientist's birth (November 14, 1891), who died prematurely at age 49, died victim of a plane crash in Newfoundland.
