What did dogs teach humans about diabetes? - Duncan C. Ferguson

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[instrumental music] Diabetes mellitus has been a scourge of the developed world, with an estimated 400 million people worldwide suffering from this disease, and 50% more predicted within 20 years. Its early symptoms, which include increased thirst and large volumes of urine, were recognized as far back as 1500 BCE in Egypt, while the term diabetes, meaning to pass through, was first used in 250 BCE by the Greek physician Apollonius of Memphis. Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, associated respectively with youth and obesity, were identified as separate conditions by Indian physicians somewhere in the fifth century CE. But despite the disease being known, a diagnosis of diabetes in a human patient would remain tantamount to a death sentence until the early 20th century, its causes unknown. What changed this dire situation was the help of humanity's longtime animal partner, Canis lupus familiaris, domesticated from gray wolves thousands of years ago. In 1890, the German scientists von Mering and Minkowski demonstrated that removing a dog's pancreas caused it to develop all the signs of diabetes, thus establishing the organ's central role in the disease. But the exact mechanism by which this occurred remained a mystery until 1920, when a young Canadian surgeon named Frederick Banting and his student, Charles Best, advanced the findings of their German colleagues. Working under Professor MacLeod at the University of Toronto, they confirmed that the pancreas was responsible for regulating blood glucose, successfully treating diabetic dogs by injecting them with an extract they had prepared from pancreas tissue. By 1922, the researchers working with biochemist James Collip were able to develop a similar extract from beef pancreas to first treat a 14-year-old diabetic boy, followed by six additional patients. The manufacturing process for this extract, now known as insulin, was eventually turned over to a pharmaceutical company that makes different types of injectable insulin to this day. Banting and MacLeod received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1923 for their discovery, but Banting chose to share his portion with Charles Best for his help in the initial studies involving dogs. But while medical experimentation on animals remains controversial, in this case at least, it was not just a matter of exploiting dogs for human needs. Dogs develop diabetes at the rate of two cases