The Bakerian Lecture,1972 - Insulin, its chemistry and biochemistry

Abstract

It is fifty years, this year, since insulin was successfully used to treat patients suffering from diabetes. It is thirty years since A. C. Chibnall gave the Bakerian lecture on ‘Amino acid analysis and the structure of proteins’, (1942), including insulin, and ten years since F. G. Young gave the Croonian lecture on ‘Insulin and its action’ (1962). It is difficult not to feel that this is a particularly appropriate moment at which to discuss, once again, insulin, its chemistry and biochemistry, its structure and function. Chibnall did, of course, warn us in 1942 to beware of the ‘hypnotic power of numerology’. The most serious reason for discussing insulin today is not the existence of the recurring anniversaries (other dates are more important in the history of the study of insulin), but the fact that we still do not know how it works in living creatures. Very recently we have acquired a great wealth of new information about the actual arrangement in space of the atoms in insulin molecules in crystals. We can begin to answer many of the questions chemists and biochemists have been asking about the behaviour of insulin for years past. It seems useful to give here some of these answers in the hope that they may guide further experiments towards the complete understanding of the action of insulin that still eludes us.