I decided to investigate how the insulin I'm injecting 4 times a day is made. Turns out its all done with recombinant-DNA technology. How cool is that
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Insulin in E. coli is a mature tech and the first real significant success story for genetic engineering; we got very fortunate in human insulin being something that can easily be generated inside bacteria and then secreted/extracted from the bacteria without messing it up, which is not the case for many other proteins. I had not known about the slow-release yeast variant, though. That's very cool.
in third year university, around 1981, i did a month long unit in chem eng where we attempted the extraction of insulin from ground cow pancreas. the first stage was an acid-alcohol extraction. i believe that was Banting and Best's active product. Then we tried to reduce it to the modern preparation... not sure we kept much activity past that, though.
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