Books: Breakthrough

Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg's Breakthrough *** - The story about insulin's discovery is an amazing one.  The time: a world in recovery from the devastation of WWI and the Spanish Flu.  The patient: the daughter of a well-respected politician.  The protagonists: four people whose picture was never contained within one frame.  In the late 1910s, diabetes was one-hundred percent fatal and the standard of treatment at that time was starvation, or the Allen treatment.  But one night, Fred Banting, a young Canadian physician, while reading a journal article, scribbled twenty-five words on a piece of paper, and his near manic obsession to actualize those twenty-five words, led to one of the medical world's greatest breakthroughs.  Though the book was slow in the beginning, it necessarily had to be as it laid down factual groundwork on which the final half of the book was built.  My reading pace increased as the race for insulin's discovery and it's need to be discovered became more urgent.  To think, not even one-hundred years later, we're in a completely different world of diabetes care and management, one with multiple insulin types and even insulin pumps.  This  book gives me a greater appreciation of diabetes and its history.  And nowadays where encountering a non-diabetic is, unfortunately, not terribly rare, it's important for me to have that appreciation.  I was talking to my boss while reading this book.  "If you have insider tips on a company that can make oral insulin," he said, "let me know."  That's the next breakthrough.  But if Banting and Best were alive right now, they would know their unbelievable efforts were not in vein.