Insulin, Sir Henry and a tale to break your heart

I made a list of diseases, formerly fatal, in a comment to an earlier post and regretably one made it in which shouldn't have. It's not treated with antibiotics or immunisation. Spot it? Well, it was diabetes.

Now any ful kno that diabetes is treated with insulin (or diet in its mildest form) but prior to the 1920's, it could only be treated with diet. There was no way to compensate for the body's inadequate production of natural insulin in any other way. Which leads me on to a quite sad tale.

Medical research is very often a tale of the great and good; Chain and Florey and penicillin; Milstein and monoclonal antibodies; Doll and Bradley and the link between smoking and lung cancer; Barnard and replacement organs. But the 'little people' are often forgotten in all this.

(By the way, I did not forget about Alexander Fleming and penicillin but, in my humble opinion, he did not deserve the share in the Nobel prize he got. Noticing the antibacterial effects of the mould and then sitting on your hands for the next 15 years, while Chain and Florey do all the donkey work, does not qualify you for the most prestigous prize in medicine. After all, I regularly notice that the grass turns to rust on the lawnmower over the winter but I can scarcely expect the Nobel prize for chemistry if I don't do something about stopping it, now can I?)

Anyways, the story.

Somewhere, most likely the Public Records Office in Kew, there sits a little cardboard file, filled with yellowing paper. (Assuming some over-zealous public servant hasn't got rid of it because it adds nothing to the tale of the great and good.) The file is one of many about the first trials of insulin in the UK for the treatment of diabetes.

The Medical Research Committee was set up by the UK Government in the First World War (1915) to conduct research into things like trauma, the treatment of wounds and such like; perfectly understandable, there was a bloody big war going on and lots of people were getting maimed and killed! By 1920, the Committee had mutated into the Medical Reseach Council and had got its very own National Institute for Medical Research based in the Mill Hill, London. Pretty much the first major piece of research the new Director, Sir Henry Dale, had to contend with was the trials for insulin.

Now at that time insulin was manufactured from bovine pancreases; it was not considered de riguer to use, then or now, human pancreases, although it didn't stop them from using human pituirity glands in the first trials of Human Growth Hormone in the 60's. But Sir Henry had a problem.

Independent tests of the commercially manufactured insulin raised serious doubt about its purity. Dale was worried that any impending trial could do more harm then good and therefore delayed the trial until he was satisfied that the purity of the insulin was high enough, and just as importantly, consistent enough, to mitigate as far as possible any risks to the patients.

Now buried deep within the little cardboard file is a exchange of letters between a teenager/her father and Dale. The teenager/father has obviously heard about insulin (American trials were already underway) and possibly the impending trials in the UK. She asks when will they start. Dale is reassuring but non-commital, it's all down to the manufacturer and purity levels.

The last letter is one from her father which inter alia points out that the teenager's weight is now down to five stone (32kg) but she wishes "God's speed to the Medical Research Council". The trials started some months later.

It would be nice to think that the young girl lived long enough to participate in the trials, although something tells me she didn't.

Isn't that a more interesting story than any tale of the great and good?