Frederick Banting's Theory Of Diabetes

Diabetes is a disease that many people across the world is forced to deal with every day. Today we look at diabetes as a manageable disease however, many people are unaware of just how fatal diabetes actually is. Luckily, we have discovered a hormone called insulin that has provided a treatment for them. People in today’s world has this view of diabetes as being a very manageable disease. This is because, since the nineteenth century when insulin was first discovered, by testing its ability to treat diabetes in dogs, scientists continued to improve it. Thanks to all the hard work of previous scientist, they have been able to improve insulin and discover new things about its mechanism of action so that insulin is safe for humans to use. Because …show more content…
Frederick Banting, an unknown surgeon from Canada, with a bachelor’s degree in medicine; had a theory that the digestive juices from the pancreas could be harmful in the secretion of the pancreas produced by the islets of Langerhans. Frederick thought that if you tie off the pancreatic ducts to stop the flow of nourishment to the pancreas, it would allow the pancreas to degenerate, making it shrink and lose its ability to secrete digestive juices. Frederick wanted to prove his theory, however, he did not have the material and lab space he needed. So Frederick proposed his theory to Dr. John Macleod, a Professor at the University of Toronto his idea. Dr. Macleod was not a huge fan of the theory at first but he decided to provide Dr. Frderick with a laboratory with minimum equipment, ten dogs, and an assistant. Dr. Frederick and his assistant, Charles Best, started by removing the pancreas from a dog and observing the dog’s reaction. They found that the dog’s blood sugar increased, the dog became thirsty, and became very weak as time went on. Therefore, Frederick and Best came to the conclusion that the dog had developed diabetes. After that, Frederick and Best tested another dog by removing the pancreas. They removed the pancreas, froze it in a mixture of water and salts, and then grinded it up and filtered the pancreas into a solution they called “isletin”. When Banting and Best injected the diabetic canine with “isletin”, they were able to keep it healthy and …show more content…
The hormone, insulin has evolved a long way sense, Dr. Frederick and his assistant Charles Best first discovered it. Insulin became a major turning point in the treatment of diseases when Frederick and Best discovered that they could use extracts of functional insulin producing beta cells from a healthy pancreas to treat the symptoms of diabetes. They spent their time doing countless experiments and successfully found a way to use their discovery to help keep people with diabetes