By David Rice
Public Ed Works
RALEIGH (May 29, 2025) – After 54 years with Type I diabetes, I am alive today only because of science and a loving mother. It’s science that started with research on dogs in Toronto in 1921-22.1
I was fortunate in high school to meet one of the researchers who discovered insulin – Dr. Charles H. Best. (He and co-researchers Frederick Banting and James Collip sold their patent for $1 – probably a Canadian dollar at that.2)
In that moment, he just seemed like an old man with white hair in a white coat. But after I shook his hand and returned to my seat in that Charlottesville auditorium, I found my mother sitting there crying.
I will never, ever forget that.
The technological advances since then have been stupendous – after primitive methods of “control” in my teens, today I wear a tubeless insulin pump that communicates with my continuous glucose monitor and automatically shuts down delivery of insulin if it projects I’m headed toward a low blood sugar.
I tell folks I’m bionic (as if I know what that means).
I also tell them I’ve made every mistake you can make and live to talk about it. I’m no perfect patient.
My pump was designed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It took a while to learn how to spell Rensselaer, but I surely, profoundly appreciate their work.
And the thought that the federal government would shut down or cripple that sort of research – research that saves lives – just baffles me.
No, it’s more than that. It offends me. It enrages me.
I want RFK, Jr., whose father was such a noble man (think Donald Trump could quote Aeschylus off the top of his head? 🤔 Uh, don’t think so!) to look me in the eye wearing his hipster-wannabe skinny tie and tell me that research isn’t worth our support.
It most surely is. I’m living proof.
And more people need to speak up about it.
1 https://www.discoveryofinsulin.com/history/.
2 https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expensive.
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