Word: insulin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...possible benefits promised by the controversial new work with recombinant DNA (TIME cover, April 18), none has been more widely publicized than the mass production of insulin by re-engineered bacteria. If these tiny insulin factories could indeed be created in the laboratory, they would yield a virtually unlimited supply of the hormone, which is of vital importance to many diabetics. Last week scientists at the University of California in San Francisco reported that they had taken an important first step toward that goal. Using the bold new technology, they not only gave a bacterium potential insulin-making capability...
...work bodes well for the world's millions of diabetics. The insulin for their daily shots is for the most part extracted from cow and pig pancreases obtained from slaughterhouses. But some diabetics develop strong allergic reactions to animal insulin. Both for this reason and because of the increasing demand for the hormone, which the body needs to turn sugar into energy, drug companies seeking alternative sources have pinned some of their hopes on recombinant DNA technology. By inserting the human insulin gene into the DNA of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli, they could, in theory, endow...
...guidelines adopted by the National Institutes of Health (to lessen the risk of accidentally producing an E. coli that might be harmful), such less readily available material would have required a far more stringent level of physical containment in the lab than any yet available. Instead, they experimented with insulin genes from rats. Placing this foreign DNA inside enfeebled E. coli, they were delighted to find that the genetic material was replicated every time the bacteria divided. But the scientists do not yet know whether the rat genes -in the language of molecular biology -actually expressed themselves, that is, produced...
...matter; the experimenters are convinced that they will soon be able to "switch on" the genes. Said Rutter: "I'd be surprised if it took more than a year or two." The production of human insulin will probably take much longer. Yet meanwhile, the experiments themselves should help scientists clarify the complex chemistry of insulin and better understand diabetes-which is not a single disease, as was once thought by doctors, but a variety of metabolic disorders that may afflict as many as 10 million people in the U.S. alone...
...know why there was a change in the ratio of estradiol to testosterone in the heart attack victims, but his work has shown that the hormone imbalance is also related to other abnormalities frequently found in heart patients-higher-than-normal levels of blood cholesterol, fat, sugar and insulin. That finding, he said, appears to be "the elusive link between the mild form of diabetes and heart disease." If the hormonal imbalance is proved to be the root cause of heart disease, Phillips concluded, diet, drugs or other means might be used to change the blood hormone levels in order...