Man’s Best Friend Helped With The Discovery Of Insulin
Thanks to our furry pet friends, millions of people with diabetes can live a normal life. Insulin was found in the 1880s. Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering wanted to figure out the role of the pancreas in digestion. Using test dogs, they removed its pancreas. After some time, they noticed flies were gathering around the dog’s urine. They tested its urine and noticed it had high sugar content.
Inadvertently, they’d accidentally given the dog diabetes by removing its pancreas. Later on, Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Shafer discovered only one chemical was missing from people with diabetes and called it insulin. Then, further experimentation in the 1920s led to the extraction of insulin using a series of isolated tests by Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best (Diabetes).