Author: Purple Brolly

It is only in the last hundred years that scientists have discovered a way to treat diabetes, a condition which must have urgent attention if the patient is to be prevented from wasting away. Three Britons are among those involved in the important development of insulin for injection into the body when the pancreas fails to produce its own.

The first was John Macleod (1876-1935), who was born in Perthshire and was a world-renowned physiologist working at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s. He and a colleague were the joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923 for their discovery of insulin.

The second was Frederick Sanger (1918-2013), born in Gloucestershire and engaged as a biochemist at the University of Cambridge when he sequenced the primary structure of insulin, discovering its two chains of fifty-one amino-acids in total. This groundbreaking work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958.

The third was Cairo-born Professor Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-94), who spent thirty-five years solving the three-dimensional molecular structure of insulin, also determining the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12 along the way. For this she pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

(Top image: Marco Verch at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

British cave divers are among the top practitioners and rescuers in the world ~ famously leading the team, for instance, which found and brought to safety the boys  trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. It may be hard to understand the impetus to explore subterranean caves with murky, underwater stretches. As one cave diver recently said, there are no accidents in cave diving, only fatalities.

However, the exhileration of being the first to see what is around the corner and the beauty of the caverns are what motivate these brave souls. In the UK, one of the first pioneers was Graham Balcombe (1907-2000), who helped set up the Cave Diving Group of Great Britain & N.Ireland in 1946. Another was Bob Leakey (1914-2013), who conquered his claustrophobia and aquaphobia with extraordinary courage. It was said of him that no-one wanted to be his diving ‘buddy’, but they would definitely want him in their rescue team!

Expert cave divers such as Martyn Farr (1951-) and Rick Stanton, MBE,GM (1961-) have propelled advancements in cave diving equipment. From barely being able to stand up in early rigs, it is now possible to explore deeper and further than ever before in modern wetsuits, with rebreathers and underwater scooters.

(Top image: pxhere.com / Public domain)