Ales Rarus

Since one of Funky's regular commentators here has diabetes, I thought that he and other readers would be interested in this article on a promising research on Type I diabetes.

She calls attention to the fact that Type I diabetes is really an autoimmune disease, and the lack of insulin is really a symptom of the body's attack on insulin producing beta cells in pancreas. Keep an eye on this one!

A Diabetes Researcher Forges Her Own Path to a Cure

Dr. Denise Faustman thinks she has a shot at curing diabetes. She has published one significant scientific paper after another on the disease. She has succeeded in curing it in mice, something no one else has accomplished.

But when Dr. Faustman, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, went looking for money to finance the next stage of her research, testing the ideas with diabetes patients, she could find no backers. Pharmaceutical companies turned her down. So did the Juvenile Diabetes Research Association.

Also, speaking of science resources, check out the Public Library of Science, an organization that publishes peer-reviewed scientific journals that are free to the public and entirely online.