Insulin therapy
The isolation of insulin — the pancreatic hormone that lets the body take up and use blood sugar — and its use to keep people with type 1 diabetes alive. Before it the diagnosis was a death sentence; a team at the University of Toronto extracted, purified, and first injected the hormone into a patient in 1921–22.
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The discovery that saved millions fractured its own discoverers. The 1923 Nobel Prize went to only two of the four-man Toronto team — Banting and Macleod. Banting, enraged that his lab partner Charles Best had been passed over, publicly split his prize money with Best; Macleod answered by splitting his with the chemist Collip, who had purified the extract. Banting, then 32, is still the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
它是什么
Insulin is a hormone the pancreas releases to let cells absorb sugar from the blood. In type 1 diabetes the cells that make it are destroyed, so sugar builds up in the blood while the body starves; untreated, it is quickly fatal. Insulin therapy is the replacement of that missing hormone with insulin extracted from animals — later made by other means — restoring the body's ability to use its own fuel. It treats the disease without curing it: the hormone must keep coming.
它为何重要
Before 1922 a child diagnosed with type 1 diabetes had, at best, months. The only intervention was near-starvation diets that bought a little time by giving the body less sugar to mishandle. Insulin converted an acute death sentence into a manageable chronic condition, and it did so almost overnight. It was also the first proof that a hormone could be isolated and used as a drug — the beginning of endocrinology as a treating science.
它解锁了什么
Insulin therapy created the whole practice of managing a lifelong metabolic disease, and it made the pancreas's chemistry legible. Animal insulin was purified and refined for decades; then, in 1978, human insulin became the first medicine mass-produced by recombinant DNA, splicing the human gene into bacteria — the direct descendant of the Toronto extract, and one of the first products of the genetic-engineering age.
最简可行版本
Chill and grind animal pancreas, steep it in acidified alcohol to pull out the active substance while sparing it from the gland's own digesting enzymes, filter, and concentrate — the crude extract that first lowered blood sugar in a diabetic dog.
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解锁
前沿——此后尚未绘制。
来源
- — Michael Bliss, *The Discovery of Insulin* (University of Chicago Press, 1982)
- — F. G. Banting, C. H. Best, J. B. Collip, W. R. Campbell & A. A. Fletcher, 'Pancreatic Extracts in the Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus,' Canadian Medical Association Journal (1922)
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