NPR British Scientist Driven To Find 'Spark Of Life'

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/27/161888074/british-scientist-driven-to-find-spark-of-life

Interesting interview -

"One night in 1984, British scientist Frances Ashcroft was studying electricity in the body and discovered the protein that causes neonatal diabetes. She says she felt so "over the moon" that she couldn't sleep.

By the next morning, she says, she thought it was a mistake.

But luckily, that feeling was wrong, and Ashcroft's revelation led to a medical breakthrough decades later, which now enables people born with diabetes to take pills instead of injecting insulin."



Frances Ashcroft: the doyenne of diabetes research
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60968-4/fulltext

 

What pill is that?

 

Sulphonylurea for neonatal diabetes

From the last paragraph:

... they demonstrated that mutations in the genes that encode the KATP channel explain about half of cases of neonatal diabetes, and then they went on to show that these patients could be treated with high dose sulphonylurea tablets rather than insulin injections.

 

There are many forms of neonatal diabetes. They are not all treated with pills. Ours isn't.