Word: insulin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Learning to live with diabetes is tough -especially tough for children. The careful diet and the regular shots of insulin may become a painful, depressing routine for them. The well-meant sympathy of parents and friends may make diabetic children begin to think of themselves as permanent invalids...
Chemist Sanger worked with crystalline insulin, a comparatively simple protein. First he broke the large molecules by oxidation into two fragments, one containing 21 amino-acid building blocks, the other 30. Then by other methods (e.g., hydrolysis), he broke the two parts down until he had fragments that contained only a few amino acids each. These were compounds familiar to biochemists. Sanger identified them by paper chromatography,† and the first and easiest part of his job was done...
...living things. This, they decided, must be a taillike fragment knocked off some larger fragment. They would shift it around, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, until they found a spot where it could be placed to form a familiar compound. Little by little, their picture of the insulin molecule took on detail. At last they were sure they knew where each building block belonged...
...Sanger points out that he has not synthesized insulin; he has only charted its structure. The importance of this work is that other chemists may now chart other proteins, find out whether certain groupings of amino acids in their molecules confer certain vital properties. Eventually, for instance, they may find that a small knot of amino acids makes a protein drug, like insulin, act as it does in the human body. Then perhaps a superior insulin substitute can be synthesized...
...Knopp said he would do his best. From the old man's wife, waiting in the corridor, he learned that his patient was a diabetic, on insulin for ten years. While he went on with his examination, Dr. Knopp sent the woman off with her young neighbor to be interviewed by a social service worker...