The US is not the haven of civil rights it used to be: if you believe it is, I suggest you also review the cases in Guantanamo Bay of people locked up for years without access to attorneys or their families even knowing if they're there.
Well, you've raised some good pints. Can you show what you think is BS from the page I cited? Given the high tempers and selective memories of many fervent spammer and anti-spammers, especially blacklist authors and blacklist victims, it's hard to tell without personally knowing them in detail in advance, and hard to find the details via Google.
Re-read the article. Rambam allegedly sued while the attack was going on: this is different from creating the attack. Moreover, there is a fascinating letter at http://www.dotcomeon.com/injoewetrust.html that explains that the "DDOS" was not planned, it was the direct result of not having enough bandwidth to deal with all the DNS queries caused by the SoBig virus. The letter also explains that Mr. Joe Jared, the administrator of osirusoft.com, has been playing nasty games against the domains of quite innocent people, including poisoning the DNS for big chunks of the Internet for anyone who uses his services in a fit of pique after the DDOS.
These are nasty claims, but they seem to match other reports I've seen, and the claims of harassment against osirusoft.com are poorly documented at best in their own webpage. So I'm inclined to think that Mr. Rambam had nothing to do with this and is simply trying to slap down an incompetent blacklist author.
I stuck with the Christian Bible: both Old and New Testament. Admittedly, I reached back to the Hebrew rather than the Greek scriptures. But if I started citing the weirdnesses from Revelations, few folks here would know what I was talking about. Religion is often far more fun to mock than to take seriously.
I mean, come on: Pawning off a "virgin's" unmarried pregnancy on some poor unsuspecting carpenter as "the will of God"? Yeah, right, wait until you have kids and one of them says it "just happened". Joseph got made a saint for putting up with that, as he well deserved. And I really wish we'd heard what Mary's mother and father said about that mess. I can picture the conversation.
Mom: "But Mary, you're planning on wearing white for the wedding?" Mary: "Virgin birth, Mom, remember?" Mom: "But sweetie, the wedding's in six months, that dress, ummmm, won't fit! Yeah, that's it! The white dress won't fit! We'll find you something in a nice floral pattern, it'll be very slimming!" Mary: "No, Mom, white. God says white. And Dad? God says no photographers." Dad: "No photographers, my ass! I've already paid for that!" Mary: "And Dad, speaking of your ass, we need the keys to the donkey for the honeymoon. Joseph has to go to Bethlehem for legal reasons, and by the wedding I'll be way too pregnant to walk."
You get the idea. Dante should have written Mary's parents their own ring of heaven for dealing with this.
Don't forget ripping any ATM's out of churches, acceping the poor and lame into your home, giving up your virgin daughters for wanton use to entertain any amazingly powerful guests who might visit your house without warning, and marrying men who had nothing to do with your fetus's conception because the father skipped town and can't provide child support.
Re:Positively fantastic news
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
Both pork and beef insulin are still available worldwide, due to their low cost. It's apparently only just in the US and perhaps a few wealthier countries that they're no longer available and have been replaced commercially by the human insulins.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
My relative's pump is pretty easily hackable, if you can lay hands on it. There's no password to speak of. But for remote control, the Omnipod insulin pump technology at http://www.myomnipod.com/ seems quite vulnerable to exactly this kind of remote control. I'd be a bit concerned about such security issues, much as someone with a pacemaker should be concerned about its security.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
Mail order Lantus and Humalog are about $70/bottle each: you must be using the older, cheaper insulins. And some insulin resistant Type 2's who wind up on insulin take a lot more than a normal human amoun tof insulin such as a Type 1 might use: since Type 2's outnumber Type 1's by something like 20 to 1, I assume that there are a lot of diabetics taking more insulin, and more expensive insulin, than you are.
I agree that insulin is only a modest part of the cost, I'm just pointing out that it's larger than you may realize.
Re:flamebaiter is Workin' Hard For You
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
This is why a lot of the better stem cell researchers left this country during the *Reagan* administration. But I haven't heard any notable progress from them since then, which I'd have expected from some second world nation where such research is better funded if anything were about to happen with it.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
You wrote:
> The newer insulins are analogues of the regular human insulin that give them different chemical properties, the branches on the molecule have been moved around. They crystallize differently - for faster insulins thay dont crystallize at all and hence dissolve more easily into the blood stream, for longer insulins they form larger crystals which take a realtively long time to dissolve.
> I dont think this can be done post process on already existing animal insulins you need to design this into the production from scratch. ie genetic engineer e-coli or these saflower plants.
As I understand the history, Humalog was made exactly this way: by modifying plain human insuliin manufactured by E. Coli. I don't know about Lantus, but the chemical difference is modest, and it should be as amenable to E. Coli or safflower production to use animal insulins as it is to use human insulins.
You alwo wrote:
> Lente/NPH based insulins are terrible to use - they come in a suspension(the insulin is precipitated into large crystals by zinc). A suspension is very hard to inject an accurate dose and also can block the needle(need to use wider more painful needles). Many people have real trobule with the variablity in the dosing.
I've actually gone with my relative to his doctor, to help him get the insulin pump set up. My relative got by for 30 years and was comfortable with the NPH/Regular he used, and I helped him do injections when he damaged his hand. Dosing and mixing his NPH was no more awkward than for the modern human insulins, and there's been no change in the size of needles used for diabetic injections in decades, long predating the availability of Lantus and similar insulins. In fact, when he started on the pump, he was told to use the Novolog rather than Humalog, because that tends to crystallize in the catheter less, but that's a discrepancy among short-acting human insulins. But as of 2 years ago, his doctor who is also diabetic, used Humalog and Beef NPH he'd been special ordering from England.
And no, improved glucose monitoring and control does *not* lead to hypoglycemic unawareness. According to my relative and observing him over the years when he's been really careful and when he was really careless after one of his kids died, careful monitoring helps reduce it, and careless monitoring makes it much worse. This is apparently borne out by the old glucagon response work by Dr. Santiogo's group at Barnes Hospital decades ago, where poorly controlled or longer term diabetics had less of a glucagon response to hypoglycemia. And there are actually good papers documenting this problem with the human insulins, such as those listed at http://members.tripod.com/diabetics_world/Hypoglyc emia_Unawareness_DGG.htm#05.
The age of the patents is an interesting point. While the patent for insulin was made available for public use by Dr. Banting decades ago when he discovered the hormone, a number of key patents for refining insulin were apparently about to expire when Lilly came out with the human insulins, assuring their continued dominance of that marketplace. Similarly, Lantus also came out and has phased out Lente, not necessarily to the benefit of diabetics or their insurance companies due to its much greater cost. Also similarly, the glucometers seem to be in a state of constant re-invention, with new patents and new designs assuring that no small company will ever succeed in entering the market on its own.
Except, of course, that for major distributors there tend to be some nice little "perks" and "discounts" and "value-added benefits" that are so large they affect the overall cost of the product to the vendors. If 90 out of 100 vendors buying those bulk licenses qualify for those "discounts" because they sole-source their setups from Microsoft, and the other 10 don't get the discounts even if they buy the same number of licenses, then they've been retaliated against.
Microsoft got cought doing exactly this sort of thing before their last brush with the US Department of Justice: we'll see if htey begin to stop doing it after this lawsuit.
They've been doing it for years: OEM vendors and major customers faced serious price penalties if they used non-Microsoft default web browers or streaming media players. Search tools are just the next round of Microsoft using their monopoly in the operating system to directly interfere with other markets, as vendors face penalties for installing Google or other search defaults instead of the Microsoft search engine.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
Well, there is a noticable difference. When my relative switched from animal NPH to human NPH, he had to go through all sorts of grief to get re-stabilized because it just didn't last as long, it's peak came sooner, and he had to adjust his meal schedule accordingly, which was not easy to do with his work schedule. So he eventually switched to a pump, which is wonderful and clever and costs one heck of a lot more than his old lifestyle did with multiple daily injections.
Re:Now if they could only...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
I wish. Unfortunately, insulin is a protein and easily digested, so oral insulin doesn't work.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is complete balderdash. The ultra-fast-acting insulins, such as Humalog, are not that fast because they're human. They're fast because they're modified away from normal insulin of any species. The processing to create this could be done on animal insulins, or be engineered into this safflower approach, as easily as it is done for E. Coli insulin producing bacteria now. And an insulin pump with its direct connection to the body is so fast that it matters very little which fast-acting insulin you use, whether it's the human-based Humalog or animal-based Regular. Humalog is also hideously expensive compared to "regular" insulin, and regular insulin does nearly as well in the pumps. (I have a relative who used regular when his medical insurance lapsed: it took some adjusting, but he did just fine on it and saved some badly needed cash, and I was helping hime out with money and teaching him to program the pump, so looked into this field quite seriously.)
No, the big difficulty is with the mid-range or longer acting insulins. The old, animal-based, longer acting "Lente" insulins have been phased out in favor of the vastly more expensive but somewhat flatter-in-effect "Lantus" insulins. And because the new human NPH doesn't last as long as the old animal NPH, it's not really as suitable for the long-acting use as the new Lantus. Coupled with the hypoglycemic unawareness some people (such as my relative) have with human NPH before he switched to a pump, it's good reason to avoid it.
The duration of Lantus also has very little to do with it being human based, it's a modified insulin molecule and plays interesting games with its solubility and the pH of the fluid it's in to make it last 24 hours. The same techniques can certainly be applied to animal insulins. And people used to use Lente and Ultra-Lente with similar, far less expensive effects for what Lantus does now. Lente varied more in its effects from person to person, and Lantus is apparently much closer to 24 hours in its effects, so there is an advantage there. And Lantus is flatter in its overall effects, but this is not necessarily good, since it used to be possible to juggle the peaks of mid-range insulins like NPH or Lente to match mealtimes and reduce or eliminate the need for an additional shot of fast-acting insulin with the meals. But with the phase-out of Lente production, and the shorter duration of NPH and the trend towards hypoglycemic unawareness of all the human-based insulins, it's no longer as practical.
Overall, the benefits of the human insulins are perhaps a reduction in allergies (which still happen with human insulins!), and a big benefit to the pharmaceutical companies like Lilly and Novolin because their patents were expiring for refining the animal insulins, and those patents will give them another 20 years of a captive market.
There are also a lot of insulin resistant diabetics who must take insulin, and they tend to take far *more* insulin than a classic Type 1 diabetics. Since Type 2 diabetics outnumber Type 1 by about 20 to 1, even a small percentage of Type 2 diabetics taking so much insulin easily doubles the requirement for insulin worldwide.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
People with organ transplants take a serious regime of immuno-suppressant drugs to prevent rejection: I assume that those drugs also control the auto-immune problem that destroyed insulin producing cells. But those drugs are expensive and very nasty in their complications, so such trsnsplants are not done lightly. Also, it's relatively safe for someone to give you one kidney, giving you a pancreas is much more dangerous.
Pancreas transplants aren't used because they're unreliable, the pancreas is often rejected, there aren't anywhere near enough transplants, the immuno-suppressants interfere with insulin, and the immuno-suppressants are quite dangerous.
Islet cell transplants are interesting: No, they don't require aborted fetus cells, but stem cells cultured from miscarriages could be the source of stem cells for one of the most promising approaches. Stem cells are not rejected by the body: I haven't seen anything about this line of research in years, so I assume they've encountered some other problem with such transplants.
It's certainly true that the costs of testing supplies and medications does make some money for some people, but there are far too many people interested in making a mint and getting a Nobel prize to think for a minute that people aren't pursuing alternative treatments and testing. Unfortunately, those hopes can blind people: several non-invasive glucose sensors that were pulling in investment money hand over fist turned out to be stock frauds, such as the Diasensor and the Futrex.
Re:So start a non-profit
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 2, Informative
And I have a carburetor that will make your car give 60 miles to the gallon, and a laundry ball that will let you use 1/10 the laundry detergent, and a program you can download to make your computer downloads 3 times faster, just click here!
The medical field is rife with a lot of crackpots claiming their miracle cure is being repressed by the drug industry, especially for long-term medical problems like diabetes. While the drug industry is cut throat, almost all of these "vitamin cures" are expensive snake oil sold to wishful people who'd give a lot for a real cure, and don't have the expertise to read the actual original research and say "what a crock". The NONI JUICE, Mangosteen, chromium piccolinate, and Akai rice miracle cures are all examples of such nonsense, and we're going to keep hearing about them from hopeful people seeking miracles and from unethical vendors trying to make a buck.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've got some diabetic relatives who've discussed this with me. Cheaper insulin is great, but hardly a cure, and the fiscal savings would be good. But the so-called "human insulins" when they came out were a vast disappointment to diabetics: they don't last as long as the animal insulins, and they contribute to unawareness of low blood sugars, and they cost quite a lot more.
Diabetes is also several different diseases: Type 2 diabetics usually have insulin resistance, and Type 1 diabetics usually have a complete destruction of insulin producing cells by their own body's immune system (an auto-immune disease). Type 1 actually has some interesting hope for a cure, with Dr. Faustman's work at http://www.joinleenow.org/html/trials.php. She managed to cure Type 1 in rats by turning off the immune response that destroys insulin producing cells, and the rats' own bodies naturally made new insulin producing cells from adult stem cells and cured their Type 1 diabetes.
This has already been proposed for pharmaceuticals: Being able to track the time that certain bottles of drugs were handled is a big deal in accountability for some very expensive medications.
Not a chance: you cannot mix the bloodied, used instruments with the sterile new ones on the shelf, they have to be discarded or autoclaved, and many of them are single use or packed in sterile containers which have no tool-secific shape.
Actually, he is at risk. He can lose the stock, or see its value plummet grossly, and lose his generous salary and stock benefits, both of which are quite frightening in their generosity and help fund his other investments.
Slashdot Mirror
The US is not the haven of civil rights it used to be: if you believe it is, I suggest you also review the cases in Guantanamo Bay of people locked up for years without access to attorneys or their families even knowing if they're there.
Well, you've raised some good pints. Can you show what you think is BS from the page I cited? Given the high tempers and selective memories of many fervent spammer and anti-spammers, especially blacklist authors and blacklist victims, it's hard to tell without personally knowing them in detail in advance, and hard to find the details via Google.
Re-read the article. Rambam allegedly sued while the attack was going on: this is different from creating the attack. Moreover, there is a fascinating letter at http://www.dotcomeon.com/injoewetrust.html that explains that the "DDOS" was not planned, it was the direct result of not having enough bandwidth to deal with all the DNS queries caused by the SoBig virus. The letter also explains that Mr. Joe Jared, the administrator of osirusoft.com, has been playing nasty games against the domains of quite innocent people, including poisoning the DNS for big chunks of the Internet for anyone who uses his services in a fit of pique after the DDOS.
These are nasty claims, but they seem to match other reports I've seen, and the claims of harassment against osirusoft.com are poorly documented at best in their own webpage. So I'm inclined to think that Mr. Rambam had nothing to do with this and is simply trying to slap down an incompetent blacklist author.
I stuck with the Christian Bible: both Old and New Testament. Admittedly, I reached back to the Hebrew rather than the Greek scriptures. But if I started citing the weirdnesses from Revelations, few folks here would know what I was talking about. Religion is often far more fun to mock than to take seriously.
I mean, come on: Pawning off a "virgin's" unmarried pregnancy on some poor unsuspecting carpenter as "the will of God"? Yeah, right, wait until you have kids and one of them says it "just happened". Joseph got made a saint for putting up with that, as he well deserved. And I really wish we'd heard what Mary's mother and father said about that mess. I can picture the conversation.
Mom: "But Mary, you're planning on wearing white for the wedding?"
Mary: "Virgin birth, Mom, remember?"
Mom: "But sweetie, the wedding's in six months, that dress, ummmm, won't fit! Yeah, that's it! The white dress won't fit! We'll find you something in a nice floral pattern, it'll be very slimming!"
Mary: "No, Mom, white. God says white. And Dad? God says no photographers."
Dad: "No photographers, my ass! I've already paid for that!"
Mary: "And Dad, speaking of your ass, we need the keys to the donkey for the honeymoon. Joseph has to go to Bethlehem for legal reasons, and by the wedding I'll be way too pregnant to walk."
You get the idea. Dante should have written Mary's parents their own ring of heaven for dealing with this.
Cheney. By now they've given him his own office, secretary, and heart monitor over at the CIA.
Don't forget ripping any ATM's out of churches, acceping the poor and lame into your home, giving up your virgin daughters for wanton use to entertain any amazingly powerful guests who might visit your house without warning, and marrying men who had nothing to do with your fetus's conception because the father skipped town and can't provide child support.
Both pork and beef insulin are still available worldwide, due to their low cost. It's apparently only just in the US and perhaps a few wealthier countries that they're no longer available and have been replaced commercially by the human insulins.
My relative's pump is pretty easily hackable, if you can lay hands on it. There's no password to speak of. But for remote control, the Omnipod insulin pump technology at http://www.myomnipod.com/ seems quite vulnerable to exactly this kind of remote control. I'd be a bit concerned about such security issues, much as someone with a pacemaker should be concerned about its security.
Mail order Lantus and Humalog are about $70/bottle each: you must be using the older, cheaper insulins. And some insulin resistant Type 2's who wind up on insulin take a lot more than a normal human amoun tof insulin such as a Type 1 might use: since Type 2's outnumber Type 1's by something like 20 to 1, I assume that there are a lot of diabetics taking more insulin, and more expensive insulin, than you are.
I agree that insulin is only a modest part of the cost, I'm just pointing out that it's larger than you may realize.
This is why a lot of the better stem cell researchers left this country during the *Reagan* administration. But I haven't heard any notable progress from them since then, which I'd have expected from some second world nation where such research is better funded if anything were about to happen with it.
You wrote:
c emia_Unawareness_DGG.htm#05.
> The newer insulins are analogues of the regular human insulin that give them different chemical properties, the branches on the molecule have been moved around. They crystallize differently - for faster insulins thay dont crystallize at all and hence dissolve more easily into the blood stream, for longer insulins they form larger crystals which take a realtively long time to dissolve.
> I dont think this can be done post process on already existing animal insulins you need to design this into the production from scratch. ie genetic engineer e-coli or these saflower plants.
As I understand the history, Humalog was made exactly this way: by modifying plain human insuliin manufactured by E. Coli. I don't know about Lantus, but the chemical difference is modest, and it should be as amenable to E. Coli or safflower production to use animal insulins as it is to use human insulins.
You alwo wrote:
> Lente/NPH based insulins are terrible to use - they come in a suspension(the insulin is precipitated into large crystals by zinc). A suspension is very hard to inject an accurate dose and also can block the needle(need to use wider more painful needles). Many people have real trobule with the variablity in the dosing.
I've actually gone with my relative to his doctor, to help him get the insulin pump set up. My relative got by for 30 years and was comfortable with the NPH/Regular he used, and I helped him do injections when he damaged his hand. Dosing and mixing his NPH was no more awkward than for the modern human insulins, and there's been no change in the size of needles used for diabetic injections in decades, long predating the availability of Lantus and similar insulins. In fact, when he started on the pump, he was told to use the Novolog rather than Humalog, because that tends to crystallize in the catheter less, but that's a discrepancy among short-acting human insulins. But as of 2 years ago, his doctor who is also diabetic, used Humalog and Beef NPH he'd been special ordering from England.
And no, improved glucose monitoring and control does *not* lead to hypoglycemic unawareness. According to my relative and observing him over the years when he's been really careful and when he was really careless after one of his kids died, careful monitoring helps reduce it, and careless monitoring makes it much worse. This is apparently borne out by the old glucagon response work by Dr. Santiogo's group at Barnes Hospital decades ago, where poorly controlled or longer term diabetics had less of a glucagon response to hypoglycemia. And there are actually good papers documenting this problem with the human insulins, such as those listed at http://members.tripod.com/diabetics_world/Hypogly
The age of the patents is an interesting point. While the patent for insulin was made available for public use by Dr. Banting decades ago when he discovered the hormone, a number of key patents for refining insulin were apparently about to expire when Lilly came out with the human insulins, assuring their continued dominance of that marketplace. Similarly, Lantus also came out and has phased out Lente, not necessarily to the benefit of diabetics or their insurance companies due to its much greater cost. Also similarly, the glucometers seem to be in a state of constant re-invention, with new patents and new designs assuring that no small company will ever succeed in entering the market on its own.
Except, of course, that for major distributors there tend to be some nice little "perks" and "discounts" and "value-added benefits" that are so large they affect the overall cost of the product to the vendors. If 90 out of 100 vendors buying those bulk licenses qualify for those "discounts" because they sole-source their setups from Microsoft, and the other 10 don't get the discounts even if they buy the same number of licenses, then they've been retaliated against.
Microsoft got cought doing exactly this sort of thing before their last brush with the US Department of Justice: we'll see if htey begin to stop doing it after this lawsuit.
Microsoft tends not to ask: they tend do it automatically as part of the security updates without notifying you.
They've been doing it for years: OEM vendors and major customers faced serious price penalties if they used non-Microsoft default web browers or streaming media players. Search tools are just the next round of Microsoft using their monopoly in the operating system to directly interfere with other markets, as vendors face penalties for installing Google or other search defaults instead of the Microsoft search engine.
Well, there is a noticable difference. When my relative switched from animal NPH to human NPH, he had to go through all sorts of grief to get re-stabilized because it just didn't last as long, it's peak came sooner, and he had to adjust his meal schedule accordingly, which was not easy to do with his work schedule. So he eventually switched to a pump, which is wonderful and clever and costs one heck of a lot more than his old lifestyle did with multiple daily injections.
I wish. Unfortunately, insulin is a protein and easily digested, so oral insulin doesn't work.
This is complete balderdash. The ultra-fast-acting insulins, such as Humalog, are not that fast because they're human. They're fast because they're modified away from normal insulin of any species. The processing to create this could be done on animal insulins, or be engineered into this safflower approach, as easily as it is done for E. Coli insulin producing bacteria now. And an insulin pump with its direct connection to the body is so fast that it matters very little which fast-acting insulin you use, whether it's the human-based Humalog or animal-based Regular. Humalog is also hideously expensive compared to "regular" insulin, and regular insulin does nearly as well in the pumps. (I have a relative who used regular when his medical insurance lapsed: it took some adjusting, but he did just fine on it and saved some badly needed cash, and I was helping hime out with money and teaching him to program the pump, so looked into this field quite seriously.)
No, the big difficulty is with the mid-range or longer acting insulins. The old, animal-based, longer acting "Lente" insulins have been phased out in favor of the vastly more expensive but somewhat flatter-in-effect "Lantus" insulins. And because the new human NPH doesn't last as long as the old animal NPH, it's not really as suitable for the long-acting use as the new Lantus. Coupled with the hypoglycemic unawareness some people (such as my relative) have with human NPH before he switched to a pump, it's good reason to avoid it.
The duration of Lantus also has very little to do with it being human based, it's a modified insulin molecule and plays interesting games with its solubility and the pH of the fluid it's in to make it last 24 hours. The same techniques can certainly be applied to animal insulins. And people used to use Lente and Ultra-Lente with similar, far less expensive effects for what Lantus does now. Lente varied more in its effects from person to person, and Lantus is apparently much closer to 24 hours in its effects, so there is an advantage there. And Lantus is flatter in its overall effects, but this is not necessarily good, since it used to be possible to juggle the peaks of mid-range insulins like NPH or Lente to match mealtimes and reduce or eliminate the need for an additional shot of fast-acting insulin with the meals. But with the phase-out of Lente production, and the shorter duration of NPH and the trend towards hypoglycemic unawareness of all the human-based insulins, it's no longer as practical.
Overall, the benefits of the human insulins are perhaps a reduction in allergies (which still happen with human insulins!), and a big benefit to the pharmaceutical companies like Lilly and Novolin because their patents were expiring for refining the animal insulins, and those patents will give them another 20 years of a captive market.
There are also a lot of insulin resistant diabetics who must take insulin, and they tend to take far *more* insulin than a classic Type 1 diabetics. Since Type 2 diabetics outnumber Type 1 by about 20 to 1, even a small percentage of Type 2 diabetics taking so much insulin easily doubles the requirement for insulin worldwide.
People with organ transplants take a serious regime of immuno-suppressant drugs to prevent rejection: I assume that those drugs also control the auto-immune problem that destroyed insulin producing cells. But those drugs are expensive and very nasty in their complications, so such trsnsplants are not done lightly. Also, it's relatively safe for someone to give you one kidney, giving you a pancreas is much more dangerous.
Pancreas transplants aren't used because they're unreliable, the pancreas is often rejected, there aren't anywhere near enough transplants, the immuno-suppressants interfere with insulin, and the immuno-suppressants are quite dangerous.
Islet cell transplants are interesting: No, they don't require aborted fetus cells, but stem cells cultured from miscarriages could be the source of stem cells for one of the most promising approaches. Stem cells are not rejected by the body: I haven't seen anything about this line of research in years, so I assume they've encountered some other problem with such transplants.
It's certainly true that the costs of testing supplies and medications does make some money for some people, but there are far too many people interested in making a mint and getting a Nobel prize to think for a minute that people aren't pursuing alternative treatments and testing. Unfortunately, those hopes can blind people: several non-invasive glucose sensors that were pulling in investment money hand over fist turned out to be stock frauds, such as the Diasensor and the Futrex.
And I have a carburetor that will make your car give 60 miles to the gallon, and a laundry ball that will let you use 1/10 the laundry detergent, and a program you can download to make your computer downloads 3 times faster, just click here!
The medical field is rife with a lot of crackpots claiming their miracle cure is being repressed by the drug industry, especially for long-term medical problems like diabetes. While the drug industry is cut throat, almost all of these "vitamin cures" are expensive snake oil sold to wishful people who'd give a lot for a real cure, and don't have the expertise to read the actual original research and say "what a crock". The NONI JUICE, Mangosteen, chromium piccolinate, and Akai rice miracle cures are all examples of such nonsense, and we're going to keep hearing about them from hopeful people seeking miracles and from unethical vendors trying to make a buck.
I've got some diabetic relatives who've discussed this with me. Cheaper insulin is great, but hardly a cure, and the fiscal savings would be good. But the so-called "human insulins" when they came out were a vast disappointment to diabetics: they don't last as long as the animal insulins, and they contribute to unawareness of low blood sugars, and they cost quite a lot more.
Diabetes is also several different diseases: Type 2 diabetics usually have insulin resistance, and Type 1 diabetics usually have a complete destruction of insulin producing cells by their own body's immune system (an auto-immune disease). Type 1 actually has some interesting hope for a cure, with Dr. Faustman's work at http://www.joinleenow.org/html/trials.php. She managed to cure Type 1 in rats by turning off the immune response that destroys insulin producing cells, and the rats' own bodies naturally made new insulin producing cells from adult stem cells and cured their Type 1 diabetes.
This has already been proposed for pharmaceuticals: Being able to track the time that certain bottles of drugs were handled is a big deal in accountability for some very expensive medications.
Not a chance: you cannot mix the bloodied, used instruments with the sterile new ones on the shelf, they have to be discarded or autoclaved, and many of them are single use or packed in sterile containers which have no tool-secific shape.
Actually, he is at risk. He can lose the stock, or see its value plummet grossly, and lose his generous salary and stock benefits, both of which are quite frightening in their generosity and help fund his other investments.