53 Fun Facts About Insulin

Which British prime minister takes daily insulin injections for diabetes?

Theresa May was first diagnosed with the wrong type of diabetes, and only later did tests show she had type 1.

Before insulin, which extreme treatment did Frederick Allen use to stretch diabetic patients' lives?

Starvation diets kept some patients alive longer before insulin, but some starved to death.

Which hormone from the alpha cells raises blood sugar, the opposite of insulin?

Glucagon makes the liver break down its stored glycogen and release glucose into the blood when sugar levels run low.

Some athletes misuse insulin in hopes of doing what?

Bulking up: but the gamble is dangerous, because too much insulin can drop blood sugar so low that the user loses consciousness.

What destroys the insulin-producing cells in type 1 diabetes?

An autoimmune reaction turns the immune system against the insulin-making cells, and warning antibodies usually appear years before symptoms.

Which animal's insulin is closest to human insulin and long treated diabetics?

Pig insulin differs from ours by a single amino acid, so drugmakers once turned pork insulin into exact human insulin by swapping that one unit.

Which Berlin medical student first described clusters of cells in the pancreas in 1869?

Paul Langerhans had already found, as a student in 1868, skin cells that also bear his name and later proved to be part of the immune system.

What did Minkowski and von Mering find in 1889 after removing a healthy dog's pancreas?

Sugar in its urine showed the dog had developed diabetes, sending researchers hunting for the missing substance the pancreas must make.

Who coined the word 'insulin' for a then-hypothetical islet hormone?

Edward Sharpey-Schafer didn't know that Jean de Meyer had already proposed 'insuline' for the same substance in 1909.

Which Romanian physiologist normalised a diabetic dog's blood sugar with an extract in 1916?

Nicolae Paulescu had to close his lab when troops occupied Bucharest in 1916, so his extract results weren't published until 1921.

What structure do most insulins form that delays their entry into the blood?

Hexamers must slowly break apart into single molecules before entering the blood, so fast-acting analogues are built to come apart quickly.

How was Charles Best chosen over Clark Noble as Banting's assistant in 1921?

By a coin toss, as the famous story goes, though Best himself later called the tale newspaper fiction.

What did Frederick Banting propose tying off in dogs so their digestive tissue withered but the islets survived?

The pancreatic ducts: Banting thought digestive juices were destroying the hormone, so he wanted the tissue making them to waste away first.

Which drug giant grew from the insulin lab August Krogh founded in Denmark after his wife got diabetes?

Novo Nordisk grew from that lab: Krogh had detoured to Toronto during a US lecture tour and came home with permission to make insulin.

Which animals' pancreases gave Banting a faster source of insulin from November 1921?

Fetal calves hadn't yet begun making the digestive enzymes that Banting believed destroyed insulin.

Which biochemist purified the extract enough for human use in January 1922?

James Collip worked day and night for 12 days to purify the extract after the first patient's allergic reaction.

Who received the first insulin injection, at Toronto General Hospital on 11 January 1922?

Leonard Thompson's first dose was so impure that it caused an allergic reaction, but a purer one 12 days later worked.

In 1922, when she began insulin treatment, Elizabeth Hughes was the daughter of which serving official?

Her father, US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, had nearly become President himself, losing the 1916 election to Woodrow Wilson.

Which drug company began mass-producing insulin with the Toronto team in 1922?

Eli Lilly's chemist George Walden devised a precipitation method that made insulin far purer and more plentiful.

For how much was the insulin patent assigned to the University of Toronto in 1923?

One dollar was the price, and Banting said insulin belonged to the world, not to him.

Which drug giant sold Exubera, the first inhaled insulin to reach the market?

Pfizer launched Exubera in 2006, but poor sales led it to pull the product the following year.

Which two men won the 1923 Nobel Prize for insulin, leaving Charles Best out?

Banting and Macleod won, and Banting, furious that Best had been left out, gave half his prize money to him.

When a lack of insulin becomes an emergency, what can a person's breath smell like?

Fruit: without enough insulin the body makes acetone, and breathing it out gives the breath a fruity smell.

Insulin resistance, where cells stop responding properly to insulin, is the hallmark of which condition?

Type 2 diabetes begins when muscle, fat and liver cells respond poorly to insulin, and the body can't make enough extra to compensate.

Which British biochemist sequenced insulin's amino acids?

Frederick Sanger chose insulin partly because it was one of the few proteins that could be bought in pure form.

In whose laboratory was insulin's complete 3-D structure solved in 1969?

Dorothy Hodgkin got her first insulin crystal in 1934, but X-ray methods of the day couldn't yet handle a molecule so large and complex.

Who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for developing the radioimmunoassay for insulin?

Rosalyn Yalow developed the assay with Solomon Berson, but he died in 1972, and Nobel Prizes can't be awarded posthumously.

Researchers from which country achieved synthetic crystalline bovine insulin in 1965?

China's team later had one member nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the nomination was unsuccessful.

In which bacterium was the first recombinant human insulin produced in 1978?

E. coli bacteria were given man-made genes for insulin's A and B chains separately, and scientists then mixed the chains to form insulin.

Under what brand name was the first biosynthetic human insulin sold?

Humulin offered a steady supply that didn't need animal pancreas, when about two tons of it could yield only a few hundred grams of insulin.

Besides bacteria, which organism is commonly used to make recombinant human insulin?

Baker's yeast can be engineered to secrete insulin as a single-chain precursor, which is then cut into the finished hormone.

Which three insulin analogues are rapid-acting, working within 5 to 15 minutes?

Aspart, lispro and glulisine are built to mimic the body's own insulin surge after a meal, so they're taken right around mealtimes.

How was a unit of insulin first defined in 1922?

The dose making a rabbit hypoglycaemic became the unit because the Toronto team had found insulin reliably lowered rabbits' blood sugar, giving a potency test.

What is the period soon after a type 1 diagnosis, when some patients briefly need little insulin, often called?

The honeymoon phase comes when surviving beta cells rally once insulin treatment starts, and it can last from months to years.

As of 2023, how can US patients who need animal-derived insulin get it?

By importing it: makers voluntarily stopped selling animal insulin in the US, so patients need FDA approval to bring it in for personal use.

How is insulin usually administered?

Under the skin is the usual route, and injecting the same spot over and over can leave firm fatty lumps that absorb insulin poorly.

Which Austrian psychiatrist introduced insulin coma therapy?

Manfred Sakel's coma therapy was widely used for schizophrenia, but by the late 1960s it had largely been abandoned.

How was Arnold Kadish's 1960s prototype insulin pump worn?

As a backpack: Kadish's device pumped in insulin automatically when blood sugar rose, but its bulk kept it off the market.

Frederick Banting's birthday, 14 November, is marked each year as what?

World Diabetes Day was launched by the IDF and WHO as diabetes cases climbed, and the United Nations later made it an official day.

How did Frederick Banting die in 1941?

In a plane crash: Banting was flying on a wartime mission, having turned his research to aviation medicine.

Apart from medicine, what was Banting known for in Canada?

Painting was his passion, and he painted alongside Group of Seven artists such as A. Y. Jackson, who later wrote of him as a fellow artist.

In which war did Frederick Banting serve as a battalion medical officer?

World War I: Banting served with a front-line battalion until a shrapnel wound ended his combat duty.

Which diabetic Nobel laureate lived, thanks to insulin, to find a treatment for pernicious anaemia?

George Minot's treatment had patients eat large amounts of liver every day.

For someone with diabetes, what does the A1C blood test mainly show?

Average blood sugar over about 3 months: glucose sticks to hemoglobin in red blood cells, which live roughly three to four months.

Insulin's two chains, A and B, are held together by what kind of chemical bond?

Disulfide bonds have to re-form correctly when separately made chains are joined, one reason early lab routes gave low insulin yields.

How often is the long-acting insulin icodec injected?

Weekly: icodec clings reversibly to albumin in the blood, so it's released slowly over days.

In emergencies, doctors give insulin with glucose to rapidly lower dangerously high levels of what?

Potassium: insulin pushes it out of the blood and into the body's cells, buying time until it can be removed.

Which metal forms crystals with insulin inside the storage granules of beta cells?

Zinc also slows injected insulin, so zinc-based insulins were long used for slow, background cover.

Which glucose transporter does insulin insert into the membranes of muscle and fat cells?

GLUT4 can also be pulled to the muscle-cell surface by exercise, letting muscles take in glucose even without insulin.

Which two organs are the main sites where insulin is cleared from the body?

Liver and kidney: insulin passes through the liver first, which removes much of it before the rest of the body sees it, and the kidney clears much of the rest.

The Flame of Hope, lit in 1989 beside Banting House in Ontario, is meant to burn until what happens?

Diabetes is cured: the flame is also a reminder that insulin only controls diabetes and does not cure it.

Reduced levels of insulin-related proteins made inside the brain are linked to which condition?

Alzheimer's: faulty insulin signalling in patients' brains has led some researchers to propose calling it 'type 3 diabetes'.

Which Jonas brother has needed insulin since being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2005?

Nick Jonas: he wrote the band's single 'A Little Bit Longer' about his life with the disease.