Words used for the first time 100 years ago:
Insulin was a word which resulted from the work of very young doctors. The word was derived from the Latin insula meaning island. These specific islands in question are the islets of Langerhans, the cells in the pancreas where insulin is produced, which had been discovered by the German anatomist Langerhans in 1869 when he was only 22. Each human has approximately 1 million of these islets, together weighing only 1 gram, but which are crucial for producing insulin.
It took some time before insulin itself was discovered. The word was used in French in 1909 by Belgian J De Meyer in an article on the pancreas and in a lecture 100 years ago, Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer (endocrine is another word he introduced into English) spoke about a hypothetical substance in the pancreas which prevents accumulation of glucose in the blood which he called insulin.
But although the word was coined, little progress was made in isolating insulin until the 1920s in Toronto Canada when a very young doctor who was fed up of his practice managed to gain some research space, time and a few dogs. This work done by Banting quickly found its way into the 1922 treatise entitled The preparation of pancreatic extracts containing insulin. Fame and fortune came quickly. Only the next year was Banting a co-winner of the Nobel Prize at the age of 32, still the youngest winner of the prize in the medical field. At the same time, insulin was produced with the American company Lilly, meaning that a way had been found to combat diabetes which results from low insulin levels.
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