Insulin: Diabetes Insulin was the great invention made by a Canadian that has helped not only Canadians, but people all over the world. Insulin has few uses in the human body. Some are more important than others. Insulin is a hormone that regulates the body’s use of sugar and other foods. Insulin is produced by specialized cells in the pancreas, which is a part of the pancreas. Abnormalities cause the decrease of insulin, which causes diabetes. Diabetes is a lifelong disease that has no cure, diabetes is a disease that the body cannot use sugars properly and glucose builds up in the blood. When food is absorbed into the bloodstream, the pancreas increases the secretion of insulin into the blood. Insulin speeds the movement of nutrients from the blood stream into target cells, which are located mainly in the liver, muscles, and fat tissue. Specialized protein molecules called insulin receptors that lie on the surface of the target cells. The insulin receptors bind to insulin, which activates the receptors. The activated receptors on cells hasten the entry and utilization of the nutrients. Glucose and other simple sugars, produced by the digestion of more complex carbohydrates, are used for immediate energy or converted to glycogen for storage. Amino acids, produced by the digestion of proteins, move into cells and there form the building blocks for proteins. “Insulin is not a cure for diabetes; it is a treatment. It enables the diabetic to burn sufficient carbohydrates, so that proteins and fats may be added to the diet in sufficient qualities to provide energy for the economic burdens of life”. Fatty acids, produced by the digestion of fats are converted for storage and later used for energy. This occurs when you eat foods. It takes time for the energy to be produced an insufficient amount of insulin in the body causes a form of diabetes called Type 1 Diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a disease where your body comes immune to the producing of beta cells that produce insulin. There is also another type of diabetes known as type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a disease in which your pancreas does not produce enough insulin or the beta cells do not match this is caused when your body builds up sugar in your blood instead of being used for energy. This was a serious disease that had no cure until 1922 when a man named Fredrick Banting came along and started becoming very interested in the disease diabetes.

Frederick Grant Banting was a man of many ideas and one of them was of turning point in Canadian history. Frederick Banting had an idea that would unlock the mystery of the dreaded diabetes disorder. Before this, for thousands of years, a diabetes diagnosis meant wasting away people’s lives, there was no cure. Frederick Banting had a co-worker named Charles Best who helped in the discovery of insulin. Banting got the idea for his experiments while doing background reading for a course that he was teaching on sugar metabolism. He was impressed by an account in a fairly obscure surgical journal of a patient who had stones in his pancreas, a tissue in the small bowel, which as a result had been largely destroyed. Surprisingly the patient was not diabetic. This suggested to Banting the key idea that a small part of the pancreas which secreted the active substance might survive when the pancreas was lost, that it might be recovered and the active ingredient be extracted. They work long and hard in their laboratory at Victoria University in Toronto they tried and tried but failed many times until the summer of 1921, when Fredrick Banting and Charles Best were able to make a pancreatic extract which had anti diabetic characteristics. The key ingredients are mainly human DNA, they need the nitrogen based molecules that line up to make up the proteins, also to synthesize insulin you need tanks to grow bacteria, and nutrients are needed for the bacteria to grow. They were successful in testing their