Word: insulin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Charles River critters have a distinguished history in the development and testing of vitamins, antibiotics, insulin, contraceptives and cancer drugs. Now the company has another product: the nude, athymic mouse, a hairless, pink-colored model bred without a thymus, the gland that helps the body develop immunity against outside infection. The first of these mice was an unexpected mutation, which was then bred to other mice in the Charles River labs. Now the company turns out more than 250,000 of these beasts annually. They are especially useful in cancer research because they will not reject a tumor transplant like...
...elderly too were endangered. They were often dependent upon the city's social and health workers, who traveled by bus or subway to visit them. In some cases, hospitals had to admit old people as patients. Doctors were fearful especially about diabetics who normally were given injections of insulin in their homes. Last week these people had to walk to hospitals for treatment...
Sugar, in the form of glucose, is the body's main source of fuel. Derived from all foods, but most quickly from carbohydrates, it is present in the blood in varying amounts at all times. Directly after meals, the glucose level rises. Then, as insulin secreted from the pancreas helps move sugar into cells, the glucose concentration drops. But in people with hypoglycemia it falls to an abnormally low level. In a small percentage of patients, low blood sugar can be traced to tumors of the pancreas, liver disease or previous gastrointestinal surgery. But most of today...
...only now beginning to be overcome. Also, though all vertebrate animals produce IF, it seems to be species specific, meaning that it works only in the type of animal that produces it. Monkey interferon works only in monkeys, mouse in mice and human in humans. Thus, unlike the insulin extracted from cattle and pig glands and used by humans, IF harvested from animals does not work in people. Lindenmann continued working with IF for about three years, but then left it, believing its puzzles could best be worked out by biochemists. "I spared myself years of frustration," he says. Most...
...does the body recognize when it is too fat? Work at the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle suggests that the signal may be the level of insulin in the cerebrospinal fluid. In a six-year study, researchers found that by infusing insulin directly into the brains of baboons they could get the animals to eat less and lose weight. The findings suggest a novel way to combat obesity in human beings. Fat people produce insulin in normal amounts, but the insulin sensing mechanisms in their brains may be defective. Thus, compared with people whose weight is normal...