Good news for diabetics

Scientific American ^ | 11/12/06 | Philip E. Ross

[sig226]

Putting Up with Self

Critics warned of bad experiments and false hope. But Denise Faustman seems to be right about a strategy to regrow insulin-making cells killed off in diabetes

By Philip E. Ross

Five years ago Denise Faustman stunned the biomedical world--and not in a good way, it seemed. She declared that she had cured diabetic mice by getting them to regrow their insulin-producing beta cells, a finding that, if it could be translated to humans, would spare the million-odd Americans with type 1 diabetes their daily needle pricking and insulin dosing. Since her announcement, the academic establishment has given Faustman little money and a lot of flak. Researchers complained that they could not replicate the experiments and that the Harvard Medical School researcher had cruelly raised hopes that would only be dashed.

Faustman's vindication, however, finally seems to be at hand. In March three groups reported separately in Science that they had repeated Faustman's protocols and reproduced her most important result, stopping the disease process in about half their mice and getting the animals to recover normal function. "The results are fantastic, coming from these groups, which were each paid $1 million to spend three years showing that I was wrong," she remarks. "I mean, they were all funded by the JDRF."

[sig226]

A search of keyword diabetes did not produce a reference to this article. I also didn't find sciam.com on the list of prohibited cut and pastes, so I excerpted the article. If anyone knows if they're okay, please ping me and I will paste whole article to make it easier to read.

[Pontiac]

The 50-year-old Faustman says her work also undermines an important rationale for a favored subject of diabetes research, embryonic stem cells. The hope has been to get these stem cells to turn into beta cells and thereby furnish an ample supply of the scarce tissue. The JDRF and many diabetes activists support re¬search on such stem cells,

I think this researcher broke to cardinal rules. First she threatened to cure the disease that laid the golden egg and put the LDRF people out of jobs. Second she was pursuing a cure that was not the on politically correct path.

[sig226]

Indeed. Remember peptic ulcers?

[oblomov]

Yes, we are just supposed to "race" for a cure, not actually find a cure.

Classic humor piece:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28024

[elfman2]

Good one.