Trout for Diabet.es

In the treatment of diabetes the speed with which insulin eliminates sugar from the victim's overburdened blood has been a great troublemaker. Unless the diabetic takes small doses of insulin three or four times a day, he risks insulin shock which renders him helpless and terrified.

Last summer Director H. C. Hagedorn of Copenhagen's Steno Memorial Hospital announced that he and his staff had invented a governor to regulate insulin's speed. Drs. Howard Frank Root and Priscilla White of Boston's George F. Baker Clinic went to Copenhagen to learn what Dr. Hagedorn's governor was and how to prepare it. Back to Boston they hurried to experiment on their own patients, while he continued his experiments in Copenhagen.

News of their work got around and last week, with astonishing speed for Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association published results which, although preliminary, promise vast and immediate relief for diabetics.

The substance which slows insulin's reaction in the blood is a protamine derived from the sperm of the handsome, hardy rainbow trout.

One cubic centimetre of trout protamine is mixed with approximately five cubic centimetres of ordinary insulin, plus a trifle of sodium phosphate to smooth the chemical reaction. This results in a cloudy mixture of protamine insulinate which dissolves slowly in the blood. An injection of this each evening and an injection of ordinary insulin each morning have shown such uniformly good results in diabetics of all ages and conditions that Dr. Root and associates last week jubilated: "A new revolution in the treatment of diabetes! . . . The possibility is created for the diabetic patient to resemble more closely a normal individual."

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