dani

A hundred years ago, if your kid got diabetes, the doctor's plan was to starve them. 400 calories a day. Some weeks, nothing at all. It sounds insane but there was a grim logic behind it. Type 1 diabetes killed children within months back then, and less food meant less sugar in the blood, which slowed the dying. Kids on the diet stopped dying of diabetes and died of starvation instead, just slower. Parents signed up anyway because one extra year with their child was the best medicine could offer. Elizabeth Hughes was the daughter of the US Secretary of State, so she got the best care money could buy. That care took her from 75 pounds at diagnosis down to 45 pounds by age 14. When her mother brought her to Toronto in August 1922, she could barely walk. The treatment waiting there almost never got made. Frederick Banting was a small-town surgeon whose practice was failing so badly he was nearly broke. He talked a university into lending him a lab for one summer, and with a 21-year-old student assisting, isolated the pancreatic hormone researchers had chased for 30 years. Five weeks after her first shot, Elizabeth was eating 2,500 calories a day with a pint of cream poured on top. She gained 60 pounds in four and a half months. She went to Barnard, raised a family, lived to 73, and kept the diabetes secret from almost everyone she knew. Banting refused to put his name on the patent. He'd sworn the Hippocratic oath and believed a doctor had no business profiting from something like this. His co-discoverers sold it to the University of Toronto for a dollar. "Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world." 24 months from first injection to the Nobel Prize, and every diabetic kid on earth went from a death sentence to a normal life for the price of one dollar.