Next Stop Neverland: The Novel of Insulin

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A The train of life "It happened to I was puffing and trudging on top of my train up the hill, and the engine, even though it was going at full speed, was slow and bogged down in the slush. Therefore, I jumped on another locomotive, which was going in the opposite direction! I gave my life a further acceleration and started to run fast on a soft, snowy road surface. Power or ability is useless if you don't run on the right road. People have different ways of getting to power or doing things the best way they can. Nevertheless, the question we always ask ourselves are we on the right path? Is our journey what it was meant to be, or are we going in the wrong direction? Our time is determined, and it is difficult to measure. It flows away but it flows on the road that has been marked by the locomotive that we have chosen. This should never be forgotten. It happened to I jumped on the right train. One sleepless night, when I was thinking about my debts, how unhappy I was, and couldn't fall asleep. I had an idea that would change the history of diabetes. I was reading an article published in a medical journal that I received that day, titled ‘The relationship between islets of Langerhans and diabetes in a case of pancreatic lithiasis’ by Moses Barron. Among other things he said that those who had damage of the islets of Langerhans became diabetic and that the damage was an obstruction damage..." With these words, Frederick Banting summarized the meaning of his life and the genesis of the discovery of insulin, after the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in Stockholm in 1923, and this story is incredible. Just as incredible is the story of the Nobel Prize 7 awarded to two Banting himself (then a 32-year-old doctor) and Professor James Macleod, Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto, an expert on carbohydrate metabolism. Nobel divided then further for four, including Charles Best and Bert Collip, two other researchers, with an endless procession of controversy, recriminations and disputes… However, the story of the discovery of insulin that I want to tell involves many other exceptional people, or exceptionally normal, as in a fascinating game of Chinese boxes. Their names are August and Marie Krogh, Nicolae Paulescu, George L. Zuezler, Eli Lilly sr, George Alec Clowes, and, for different reasons, Elisabeth Hughes, Sergej Diaghilev, Leonard Thompson. Researchers, scientists, doctors, but also just women and men who discovered themselves as diabetics, in a historical period in which this disease still meant death in a few years from the time of diagnosis. The discovery of insulin, in one way or another has changed the lives of all of them, as well as many other millions of people. Exceptional people or exceptional normality that have met on the train of life, sitting in the same compartment, crossing in one of the many railway stations, or simply, in some cases, arriving late to the platform and missing the connection with the train of destiny.