Insulin: The Tiny Hero That Changed the World
If your body were a video game, glucose would be the power-up that keeps your character running, jumping and smashing through levels. But here’s the twist- you can’t actually use those power-ups unless you’ve got the right key. That magical key is insulin, a tiny hormone that unlocks your body’s cells so energy can get in. Without it? The game stalls. Luckily for millions of people around the world, scientists figured out how to capture insulin just over 100 years ago- and the world has never been the same since.
Meet Insulin: Your Body’s Energy Key
Insulin is like your body’s backstage pass key. It opens the doors of your cells so glucose (sugars from your food) can get in and fuel you up. No insulin = no entry. And when glucose is stuck outside, it builds up in the bloodstream, which is what happens in Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). That’s why people with T1D need to take insulin every single day- it keeps the whole system ticking.
The Discovery Story: From Desperation to Hope
Rewind to the early 1900’s. A diagnosis of T1D was heartbreaking- there was no real treatment. Doctors tried starvation diets to keep blood sugars lower, but it wasn’t a long-term solution.
Then in 1921, a Canadian surgeon named Frederick Banting, along with a young medical student Charles Best, biochemist James Collip and physiologist John Macleod, made a discovery that would change everything. They managed to extract insulin from a dog’s pancreas, and soon after, they purified it enough to try in humans.
In 1922, a 14 year old boy named Leonard Thompson, who was dying from diabetes, became the first person to receive insulin injections. Almost overnight, his health began to turn around. It was like science had found a magic potion. Banting and his team became heroes- and they even sold the insulin patent for just $1 because they believed this life-saving treatment should belong to everyone.
Cracking the Code: Hodgkin and Sanger Step In
Finding insulin was one thing- but figuring out exactly what it looked like at the microscopic level was another giant puzzle.
Frederick (Fred) Sanger, a brilliant British biochemist, made history in 1955 by working out the exact sequence of insulin’s amino acids. This was the first time scientists had ever mapped out the full structure of a protein. Imagine trying to solve the ultimate Lego set with no picture on the box- that’s what he did!
A few years later, Dorothy Hodgkin, another British scientist and X-ray crystallography wizard, stepped in. In 1969, she revealed insulin’s full 3D structure- like turning a flat Lego instruction sheet into a complete 3D model.
Thanks to Sanger’s sequencing and Hodgkin’s 3D mapping, scientists finally understood insulin well enough to create synthetic “human insulin” in the lab. This paved the way for the biotech revolution of the 1980’s, when bacteria and yeast were engineered to produce insulin identical to what humans make. Today, we’ve got a whole menu of insulins: fast-acting, slow-acting, ultra-rapid for diabetes care.
Fun Facts
In the 1920’s, it could take 23,500 pig pancreases to make just one year’s supply of insulin for one person. Talk about a lot of bacon!
Fred Sanger won not one but two Nobel Prizes (the science version of scoring two Olympic golds).
Dorothy Hodgkin was once a teacher to a young Margaret Thatcher- yes, the future Prime Minister took chemistry lessons from the insulin-structure superstar.
Insulin was the first protein ever fully sequenced- basically the pioneer of modern biochemistry.
How Many People Use Insulin Today?
Insulin isn’t just a niche medicine- it’s a global lifeline. Around 9 million people with T1D rely on it every day to stay alive. And millions more with Type 2 Diabetes use it to help manage their blood sugars. Altogether, the World Health Organisation estimates that over 65 million people worldwide use insulin. That’s a pretty huge fan club for one tiny protein!
Why insulin is Still Amazing
In just over 100 years, insulin has gone from a desperate experiment in a Canadian lab to one of the most important medicines in history. It’s the reason people with diabetes can go to school, run marathons, become astronauts or even climb Mount Everest.
So next time you hear the word “insulin,” don’t just think of it as a shot or a pump setting. Think of it as a superhero sidekick- a tiny key that keeps millions of bodies running, powering up, and winning at life every single day.
