Researched
Insulin
Banting, Best, Macleod and Collip isolated insulin in 1921; type 1 diabetes stopped being a death sentence.
Open in the interactive tree →In Toronto in 1921-22 Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.J.R. Macleod and James Collip extracted and purified insulin from animal pancreas; the first patient, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, was treated in January 1922. Before that, type 1 diabetes meant starvation diets and death within months or a few years. Insulin turned a fatal disease into a manageable one and, in 1982, became the first drug made by genetic engineering.
Prerequisites
- Anatomy and blood circulation1543
- Organic Synthesis (Wöhler)1828
- Hormones1902-1905Insulin was found as the pancreas's blood-borne messenger, the hormone idea applied to diabetes
Unlocks
- GLP-1 weight-loss drugs2021Peptide-hormone therapy for diabetes began with insulin