Imagine being told you had a year to live, tops.

That was the reality for diabetics before 1921.

Diabetes was a death sentence, plain and simple. Kids would waste away while their families watched helplessly. The only “treatment” was basically starving yourself, which bought you a bit more time but made life miserable.

Then came insulin, and everything changed.

The beginning

The insulin story kicks off with a bunch of doctors and scientists poking around in animal guts (quite literally), trying to figure out why diabetics couldn’t process sugar.

They knew the pancreas was involved somehow, but they couldn’t nail down exactly what was going on.

Enter Frederick Banting, a young Canadian doctor with more guts than experience.

He had this wild idea about isolating whatever the pancreas was pumping out to control blood sugar. Most scientists laughed him off, but he managed to convince one guy, Professor Macleod at the University of Toronto, to give him a shot.

Life savers

Banting and his assistant, Charles Best, spent a sweltering summer in 1921 doing some pretty gnarly experiments. They’d take out dogs’ pancreases to make them diabetic, then grind up other dogs’ pancreases and inject the goop into the sick dogs.

It was messy work, but it paid off – the extract worked like magic, bringing those dogs back from the brink.

They refined their pancreas juice (which they originally called “isletin” before settling on “insulin”) and in January 1922, they tried it on a human for the first time. Leonard Thompson was a 14-year-old kid knocking on death’s door.

The insulin saved his life, simple as that.

Spreading of the news

Word spread like wildfire, and suddenly everyone and their diabetic uncle wanted this miracle drug.

But there was a problem – you can only chop up so many dog pancreases before you run out of dogs.

The team switched to cow pancreases from slaughterhouses, which helped, but it was still a major pain to extract enough insulin.

For the next few decades, insulin mostly came from pigs. Pig insulin is pretty close to human insulin, so it worked well enough.

But some folks had nasty reactions to it, and others developed resistance over time.

The “clean” insulin

The real game-changer came in the late 1970s when scientists figured out how to hack bacteria into little insulin factories.

They took the human insulin gene and shoved it into E. coli bacteria.

Suddenly, those tiny bugs were pumping out perfect human insulin like nobody’s business.

By 1982, this lab-grown insulin hit the market, and it was a big deal. No more worries about pig shortages or allergic reactions. Plus, you could make as much as you wanted without harming a single animal.

Work in progress

Since then, scientists have been tweaking insulin to make it work even better. We’ve got fast-acting insulin, slow-release insulin, and all sorts of fancy variations that help people manage their diabetes more easily.

The switch from animal pancreases to high-tech labs wasn’t just about making insulin easier to get. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities in medicine.

Suddenly, we could use genetic engineering to make all sorts of human proteins in the lab. It was like magic, but with science.

Current problems

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

There are still big questions about who gets access to insulin and how much it should cost.

In some parts of the world, diabetics struggle to afford the insulin they need to stay alive. Miracle drugs come with complicated real-world baggage.

The future

Scientists are working on even cooler ways to tackle diabetes.

There’s talk of insulin you can inhale instead of inject, artificial pancreases that do all the work for you, and even treatments that might cure type 1 diabetes altogether.

The insulin story is pretty wild when you think about it.

We went from chopping up pig parts to programming bacteria in just a few decades. It’s saved millions of lives and changed how we think about treating diseases.

Similar scientific revolutions are well under way right now, even within our food supply, like a process called precision fermentation which got a huge boost in funding and could once truly change the way our food is made (especially animal-based products.

Science and technology has come a long way. And it’s not all bad! Not bad at all.