Historical Background of Pancreatic Islet Isolation

Abstract

Until the discovery of insulin in the twentieth century, diabetes mellitus was a mortal disease with an unclear origin and physiology. Despite the appearance of the concept in an Egyptian papyrus dated c.1550 BC, and the documentation of its study by ancient Chinese, the term “diabetes” was only coined by the Greek Aretaeus in the second century AD. In Europe, the study of diabetes was largely ignored until the seventeenth century, when the characteristic sweet flavor of diabetic urine was first described. However, the link between diabetes and the pancreas was not discovered until 1889 by Minkowski and von Mering, long after the first description of the pancreatic islets by Paul Langerhans in 1869. One of the most significant milestones in the field was the discovery of insulin by Banting and collaborators in 1922, which led to the therapeutic development of insulin administration as a life-saving intervention for type 1 diabetic patients. On the other hand, the isolation of islets was first reported by Bensley in 1911, a critical technical achievement that paved the way for clinical islet transplantation. Here we discuss the history of islet isolation, since the firsts studies of diabetes by ancient civilizations to the birth and parallel evolution of islet isolation and transplantation.