On 7 feb 1922 three canadian scientist went into a ward with dying children. The children suffered from diabetes type 1 and were lying in a coma slowly dying. Sometimes over 50 children were in one ward with their parents, that could do absolutely nothing. The scientist injected them with a new substance they had isolated from the pancreas of dogs.  Miraculously, one by one, the children woke up. The parents could not believe what they saw. Until then diabetes was a death sentence. The only way to survive as long as possible was to eat as little as 500 kcal per day, and to avoid sugars. Most people couldn't sustain this or starved to death.

![diabetis.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmfKkgqGTSEApyGUHTM5cGMDmtzfbsHusuX8CLdbt96tuY/diabetis.jpg)

It was already known for more than a century that these people had sugar in their urine, and likely could not process sugar.  And even the Egyptians have references to the disease talking about excessive urination. It was a Greek physician who called it diabetes, while the Chinese called it at the same time, urination and wasting away.  These symptoms are caused by sugar in the urine, which dehydrates the person and make them very thirsty at the same time. The body can’t use the sugaring the blood for energy and eventually the body breaks down the body tissue and forms ketones, which poisons the patient.

It's one of the most amazing stories of the discovery of a new medicine. What a lot of people don't know is that these scientist that discovered insulin were not the first. They overtook German scientist, who's funds were cut off because of WW 1. And the discovery was almost jeopardized because of the distrust the scientist had with each other. They started out as friends, but got distrustful and suspicious that one would claim the discovery and leave the other on the side.
Two of them got the Nobel prize, which emphasized the situation, but eventually they shared the prize with the three of them (Banting, Best and Collip)

Within one year after the event on the ward Elli Lilly was mass-producing insulin using pig and cow pancreases taken from slaughterhouses and shipping the drug around the world.  It is for this reason as well that some pharmaceutical companies used to be slaughter houses, as they started with producing Insulin. It was still a challenge to know how much insulin to take, but more on the development on analysis kits in another post.

Now 100 years later, insulin is still the only treatment for diabetes type 1. It doesn't come from pigs or cows anymore, instead it's produced by bacteria that are genetically engineered to produce human Insulin.  Part of the human genome is built into the bacterium genome, and just in front of this piece of DNA that codes for insulin, there is an “on switch”, which tells the bacterium to start reading its DNA at that point to make Insulin.  The bacterium is set to read this part of the DNA continuously, and has become a small insulin production machine. This insulin gets isolated, and purified, and treats millions of people with diabetes all over the world.  It’s still the only treatment for diabetes type 1, type 2 that’s another story….