One hundred years ago: the dawning of the insulin era
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EDITORIAL
One hundred years ago: the dawning of the insulin era Massimo Porta1
© Springer-Verlag Italia S.r.l., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The dawn of the insulin era can be placed in 1921, when Banting and Best started their experiments which led, a year later, to the successful treatment of diabetes. They were preceded by the discoveries of the pancreatic cause of diabetes by Minkowski and von Mering in 1889 and of the islets by Paul Langerhans in 1869. The achievement of the first targeted treatment in medical history was a landmark of medical progress. However, it was accompanied by a mixture of human greatness and misery. Genius and recklessness, ambition and deception, camaraderie and rivalry, selflessness and pursuit of glory went along with superficial search of the existing literature, poor planning, faulty interpretation of results, failure to reproduce them, and misquoting of reports from other laboratories. Then as now, such faults surface whenever human nature aims to push forward the boundaries of knowledge and pose a real challenge in today’s world, as the scientific method strives to keep healthy in the face of growing anti-scientific feelings. Keywords Insulin · History of diabetes · History of medicine · Publication ethics "The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921–22 was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the treatment of disease. Insulin’s impact was so sensational because of the incredible effect it had on diabetic patients. Those who watched the first starved, sometimes comatose, diabetics receive insulin and return to life saw one of the genuine miracles of modern medicine. They were present at the closest approach to the resurrection of the body that our secular society can achieve, and at the discovery of what has become the elixir of life for millions of human beings around the world."
Managed by Massimo Porta. * Massimo Porta [email protected] 1
Department of Medical Sciences, University of Turin, Corso AM Dogliotti 14, 10126 Turin, Italy
No words are better to describe what happened a hundred years ago than the opening sentence of Michael Bliss’s deeply researched book on “The Discovery of Insulin” [1] and how those events reverberate unabated to our days. Frederick Grant Banting had served as a surgeon in World War 1 in Europe. On October 20, 1920, after his return to Canada, he was reading a paper by Moses Barron describing a case of atrophy of the exocrine pancreas in a rare instance of duct obstruction caused by a stone [2], while preparing a lecture on carbohydrate metabolism. In his own later words “Finally, about two in the morning after the lecture and the article had been chasing each other through my mind for some time, the idea occurred to me that by the experimental ligation of the duct and the subsequent degeneration of a portion of the pancreas, one might obtain the internal secretion free from the external secretion” [3]. The way had been opened in 1889 by Oskar Minkowski and Josef von Mering, who demonstrated t
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