INSULIN

Introduction

History. Few events in the history of medicine are more dramatic than the discovery of insulin. Although the discovery is appropriately attributed to Banting and Best, others provided important observations and techniques that made it possible. In 1869, a German medical student, Paul Langerhans, noted that the pancreas contains two distinct groups of cellsthe acinar cells, which secrete digestive enzymes, and cells that are clustered in islands, or islets, which he suggested served a second function. Direct evidence for this function came in 1889, when Minkowski and von Mering showed that pancreatectomized dogs exhibit a syndrome similar to diabetes mellitus in humans.

Chemistry.Insulin was purified and crystallized by Abel within a few years of its discovery. Sanger established the amino acid sequence of insulin in 1960, the protein was synthesized in 1963, and Hodgkin and coworkers elucidated insulin's three-dimensional structure in 1972.......

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Title: Insulin
Approximate Word Count: 10538
Approximate Pages: 43 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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