Finding the chase and cutting to it

If there is one truth in my life it is that I love to learn.

Yesterday, I got to share some of my learning about Insulin Kinetics with a group of gifted and talented students at Ipswich School.

And thanks to Wikipedia I could reuse with modification the insulin structure image to help share what I have learnt about insulin kinetics.

I have submitted material that has been published/presented in some of the top universities studying endocrinology but this was my first time doing it myself.

Insulin what???

Kinetics: the study of insulin in a living organism.  In this case, a human being.

Through much of my training in the past, I knew pictures and diagrams would help describe what was happening.  For this presentation I had little opportunity to make my own so I used Google images with a filter to find ones which I could reuse and alter like the image from Wikipedia above :).

Comparing that image to the explanation I was given as a four year old that insulin attached itself to Glucose in the blood and pulled it apart is tangible when you compare the two objects.  Glucose is extremely simple and looks really small.  Insulin is this hugely complex monster which looks like it could grab hold of insulin.

This understanding of insulin came from a Nobel laureate, Dorothy Hogkin forty years after insulin was first used to help type 1 diabetics to live beyond initial diagnosis.  Which led to better understanding between the differences between porcine and bovine insulin compared to human insulin.  Which enabled the first human insulins to be developed using bacteria to alter porcine insulin.

While doing my talk, I learnt yesterday that modern human analogue insulins are bred purely from bacteria.

I didn’t know that.