Word: insulin
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Secret of Insulin. Led by a man thumping a small drum, a joyful group gathered in a Cambridge University lab to celebrate with champagne when word came that this year's chemistry prize had gone to British Chemist Frederick Sanger. A fellow at King's College, Sanger is attacking the mystery of life from another chemical angle. In 1954 Sanger announced that after ten years of work, he and a small group of colleagues had determined the structure of the insulin molecule. Their achievement did not result in cheaper or better insulin for the world's diabetics...
Proteins are enormously complicated molecules, and until Sanger's work on insulin, no one had ever been able to determine the structure of even the simplest of them. Chemists have known for many years that protein molecules are made of amino acids (nitrogen-containing organic acids) strung together in long chains or cables. By various kinds of rough treatment, the chemists could separate and count the amino acid building blocks. But this did not reveal their structural plan...
Murder by Insulin. The damning sequence brought out in court: Barlow must have switched from ergometrine injections to insulin. These made his wife stuporous and complaisant. Then he gave her still more. She sweated abundantly and vomited. Comatose in the tub. she made no effort to save herself as she slid under the water, which soon filled her lungs...
...Laboratory, using 1,220 mice, 150 rats and 24 guinea pigs, to find out. After four puzzling days, a sharp-eyed pathologist found four injection marks in Mrs. Barlow's buttocks, two on each side. From each site he removed part of the underlying tissue for analysis, suspecting insulin. Barlow's boast had been half right: insulin is almost impossible to detect. But by extraordinarily ingenious methods described in the British Medical Journal, the drug sleuths found a way to prove that there had been 84 units of insulin in Mrs. Barlow's buttocks when she died...
...verdict: murder: It was Britain's -perhaps the world's-first case of murder in which the aid of insulin was proved. Said the bewigged Mr. Justice Diplock: "But for a high degree of detective ability, [it] would not have been found out. Those responsible for the scientific research ... are to be very highly congratulated for [their] skill and patience." Barlow was sentenced to life imprisonment. The medical researchers are churning out bushels of data to help colleagues find the flaw in any such "perfect crime...