insulin
/ˈɪnsəlɪn/ noun C1- A polypeptide hormone that regulates carbohydrate metabolism (in various animals including humans). · Mommy said that Grandma's diabetes happened because her body stopped making its own insulin.
- Any exogenous preparation of this hormone for use as a medication. · The advent of insulin in the mid-20th century changed the lives of millions of people with diabetes.
- Any exogenous preparation of this hormone or its analogues for use as a medication. · A: What kind of insulin do you take? B: I use basal-bolus therapy, which in my case involves glargine and lispro.
Plural insulins
From the library
Words often attributed to Banting sum up the spirit of the decision: insulin, he is supposed to have said, belonged not to him but to the world.
In 1969, after thirty-four years of work, Dorothy Hodgkin and her team at Oxford finally worked out the three-dimensional structure of insulin, the hormone that people with type 1 diabetes cannot produce.
When she took her first X-ray photograph of insulin in 1935, she was so excited, the story goes, that she wandered the streets of Oxford that night, only to wake the next morning wondering how far the photograph really was from an answer.
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