April 15th

This day in history is a bit of a dark one. In 1912 a big boat hit an iceberg and sank with the loss of hundreds of lives and a film by James Cameron that is so saccharine that just watching it could give you diabetes (of which more later). In 1989 an F.A. Cup semi-final turned into a nightmare, one that millions of television viewers saw unfolding live. Nearly a hundred people lost their lives that day and thanks to the vile so-called reporting of The Sun, the dead, the injured and everyone who had tried to help were portrayed as drunken yobs with the implicit message being that they got what they deserved.

Titanic: The band who played on

I don’t want to write about these things. The story of the Titanic is too well-known by everyone. The story of Hillsborough is known throughout the UK and beyond and it is too recent and too painful to go over yet again. Instead I have looked for good news. The fact that today in 1955 is the date that McDonald’s says its first “restaurant” was opened by Ray Kroc in Illinois, was not really the good news I was looking for, but then I found that back in 1923, today was the day that, for the first time,  insulin was first generally available for the use of people with diabetes.

We all know that diabetes is a debilitating chronic condition, but with nearly a century of a workable treatment now behind us, it is difficult to imagine what life must have been like for a diabetic before insulin was available. It was generally a fatal disease for which there was no real treatment. For older type 2 diabetics there was some hope of life if they watched their diet and didn’t drink alcohol, but for younger people with type 1 diabetes, there was little or no hope.  A doctor wrote of one girl he’d known as a boy. She was put on the Allen “starvation diet”, a severe restriction of calorie intake. At first it seemed to work and she improved, but before long she was in a ketoacidosis coma and died several weeks later.

Serious work had begun in the late nineteenth century, in an attempt to understand diabetes. By 1869 it was understood that there were little “islands” in the pancreas that might be producing secretions that assisted with digestion. There were and this is what we now know as insulin (from insula, the Latin for a small island).  In 1889 early experiments on dogs. The removal of a dog’s pancreas to discover exactly how it controlled digestion, led to an enormous breakthrough. When the dog’s keeper noticed flies swarming around its urine, scientists involved with the program tested it and discovered that it was full of sugar. For the first time the relationship between the pancreas and diabetes was understood. More breakthroughs were made and it was very quickly clear that in order to treat the disease medicine would have to find a way of collecting insulin and giving it to diabetics who were unable to produce it.

Unfortunately, just as real progress was being made WWI intervened and delayed the discovery that was to happen in the early 1920s in Toronto. Frederick Banting read the papers of an earlier pioneer called Oscar Minkowski and believed he knew how to isolate the insulin secretions make the available for medical use. In 1921 Professor J.R.R. McLeod of Toronto University with his ideas and asked for laboratory space and support to develop them. McLeod gave him space for the summer, two medical students and ten dogs. Over the course of the next year, Banting worked closely with one of the students, Charles Best, reporting back to McLeod, a chap called

Banting and Best

James Collip was also brought into assist on biochemical aspects of the project. There were many ups and downs. The first prototype was used on a fourteen year old boy who was dying, but led to a severe allergic reaction due to the impurity of the insulin. The group worked feverishly for the next twelve days to purify the insulin and then it was ready to be used. The first patient successfully treated with it was Elizabeth Hughes Gossett who was the daughter of the governor of New York. Elizabeth had previously been kept alive, just about, by the Allen diet that proved so unsuccessful for an earlier young girl. More dramatically, the team visited a ward of about 50 children all in ketoacidosis comas. They went from bed to bed injecting the children and by the time they reached the final children in the ward, the first children injected were already coming out of their comas. Finally there was something that could, if not cure the disease, allow people to live a relatively normal life and most importantly not die of diabetes.

This all happened in the early and middle months of 1922. By the time experiments had proved to be both successful and safe and production was rushed through, it was April 15th 1923 and this became the day that diabetes was finally tamed enough to mean that its diagnosis was no longer a death sentence.

So, there you have it, my friends. On  a day when many horrid things happened, some Canadians did something pretty damn special. They made life possible for many people, especially children with the disease, they were in place to mop up the future diabetes 2 explosion which was helped along a little by old Ray Kroc’s big idea in 1955 and because of them it  was possible to watch Titanic without slipping into a diabetic coma. Nice work those chaps!

Today is the birthday of Jeffrey Archer. He is a noted author, (n.b. noted is not the same as “good” in this context), ex-politician, one time chairman of the Conservative party, a Baron and a right dodgy ex-con.

Archer’s career has been generously decorated with lies, delusions, sex with prostitutes and a fragrant wife. I spoke to the fragrant Mary Archeron the phone once. She was quite polite.  He has also written many books. I freely admit to having read one of these, Kane an Abel, and having really rather enjoyed it . I think this was because I’d seen the mini-series of it with Sam Neill and Peter

Archer boasts about all the shit books wot he's writted

Strauss, so that I got to picture them when I read the book. I also picked up one of  his others and sweet mother of all that is good and holy, it was shit. He is a very dull and untalented man, who is famous for plagiarism and given that he’s still mostly shit, he must plagiarise really shit writers, so he also has no taste.

Okay, I’m a tiny bit ashamed of the whole Kane and Abel thing, but  I think he probably nicked that one off of someone who was half-decent when it came to schlocky potboilers.

Apart from that he’s cheated on his wife, his exams, on just about everything he’s ever done. He’s stolen money, ideas, he’s been a big fraud and pretty much an all-round shitter of the highest order. Most people in the UK were well chuffed when the dirty wee shite went to prison, although it was a shame when he came out and wrote a play about prison, the cunt.

So, happy birthday you overgrown schoolboy, you human incarnation of Toad of Toad Hall, you vile little man, you heinous fucktard. I hope that the year ahead brings you atrophy of the penis and all the other things you so richly deserve.