Wasn it through lab animals that scientists discovered diabetes and developed insulin?
Pro-animal experiment contingencies always cite the development of insulin as support for continued animal testing. They assert, with justification, that without insulin harvested from slaughterhouses many diabetics would have lost their lives. Whereas it is true that animals have figured largely in the history of diabetic research and therapy, their use has not been necessary and furthermore has not always advanced science. Diabetes is a very serious disease, even today affecting ten to fourteen million Americans. It is a leading cause of blindness, amputation, kidney failure and premature death. Although the clinical signs of human diabetes have been known since the first century AD, not until the late eighteenth century did physicians associate the disease with characteristic changes in the pancreas seen at autopsy. As this was difficult to reproduce in animals, many scientists disputed the role of the pancreas in the disease. Nearly a century later, in 1869, scientists identified i
