A child suffering from type 1 diabetes has his insulin pump catheter placed in his thigh.
Image: dpa
When insulin therapy was invented a hundred years ago, many spoke of magic: since then, the hormone has saved millions of people. Nevertheless, many diabetics do not have access to the life-saving medicine. What does the future hold?
Leonard Thompson had nothing to lose when, on January 23, 1922, at the Children’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, he was injected with a drug obtained from the pancreas of slaughtered cattle by surgeon Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best. The 14-year-old barely weighed 30 kilograms, it was unclear whether he would see the next day. He suffered from diabetes mellitus – a death sentence at the beginning of the 20th century. But the substance, which its inventors called “insulin”, saved Thompson, in the spring he left the clinic and lived into adulthood.
What followed this experiment on a January day exactly one hundred years ago is a miracle in the history of medicine: Since then, insulin has saved millions of people from death and enabled diabetics to lead a self-determined life. Today, self-regulating “smart hormones” and high-tech insulin pumps are within reach – and yet the dream of the inventors was not fulfilled: Even after a hundred years, many diabetics still have no access to the insulin they urgently need.