Sir Henry Dale (1960)

so henry looking back what do you consider to be the real beginning of your work for which you eventually shared the nobel prize with otto lervie in 1936 well i think i should date it from 1904 the actual beginning when i had gone to work in laboratories which henry welcome founded in connection with his business and having i suppose a reasonably good physiological technique but practically no pharmacological experience i was nevertheless beginning work on the drug ergot and trying to find the nature of its real active principle and having worked for some hours on a spinal cat a cat with its brain completely destroyed so that it was entirely insensible i could go on with it for any time and having finished my experiments on some over preparations which my then colleague george barger had given me to cry i received from the factory a batch of granules made from the super renal gland with a request that i would test them for what was then the only active constituent known of the super renal gland namely the adrenaline and it's medulla and i thought i've got a perfectly good cat i may as well use it now to test these granules and i made an extract injected a dose into the vein of the cat and to my surprise and discomfort instead of raising the blood pressure which of course had really does in a dramatic manner it caused it to give a profound fall and being as i said quite an experienced at the time in pharmacology and its meanings i wrote off at once to say this is a bad batch of material and you can't possibly issue it and you'd better destroy it and then by tremendous good luck the same thing and in the same order happened a week later and i put on my thinking cap and saying this can't be the regular output i must have been doing something wrong i wonder what it is and it seemed to me that the only thing was to take prepare a fresh experimental animal and try again uh without giving the over preparations in the first instance the result that there was the perfectly normal rise of the blood treasure and of course i had to write off and say i don't know whether you were sending me a french batch or whether you were testing not the drug but the new pharmacologist and in any case i must withdraw the adverse report i gave last week and tell you that your super renal granules are perfectly good in the respect from which i tested them and this started you working in this field not immediately working but thinking in that field and later when another accident started me off in that direction on the more general law of the chemical transmission at nerve effect or junctions for which i was eventually together with my friend of many years otto lilly from gratz was to receive a nobel prize in 1936 to go back though what was the explanation as to why the cat which had had er god responded in this anomalous way to adrenaline well the ogre could somehow change the manner of response of plain muscle to adrenaline or to sympathetic nerve impulses if you ask me why even now 60 years later i don't think there is anybody who would claim to know so henry you've been in medical research all your life have you ever regretted missing the personal drama of medical practice the saving of lives but i'm just thinking of an episode which occurred soon after i went to the national institute for medical research their building at hampstead one of my first duties there was to go to canada to report on the rumor not much more than that which had come to england to the effect of two young and inexperienced canadians had done what many research workers have long to be able to do for many years namely isolate the active principle from the pancreas which is known to be missing in diabetes banding at best and discovered what they quite properly named insulin and i was sent to find out is this a true bill if so what are we to do in this country to get on with it and make it available and when i came back i brought with me such modest sample as could be spared of insulin which according to the rather poor methods that available had been labeled to generate in what they called units of activity and in order to develop the production of insulin in this country with maximum speed i was bound with my colleagues to use this as the standard for comparison and reference in holding the hands that is to say of people who on a small scale in certain hospitals and in preparation for large-scale production in certain commercial laboratories were already at work producing insulin and needing to be guided and confirmed at every stage and incidentally i received i was by way of receiving many appeals but one struck me particularly a distinguished dignitary of the church who had married late in life and had one small daughter and this child had been stricken with severe diabetes and her doctor had told the parents the only thing would possibly savor if we could get some of this insulin and enough of it to not only to give a dose but to continue the treatment until it is generally available or generally available else from elsewhere in sufficient amount to make the treatment continuous nothing can be done and he appeals to me not in any pressing sense but somebody has told him that i possess a certain amount of incident he thinks it is duty to inquire whether any of it could possibly be spared and i had to write back and say i can explain the position to you i do have a certain amount of insulin but i'm i'm bound to preserve it like the apple of my eye i mean because it's the only standard of reference we've got in this country which we can use as a guide to make insulin generally available here with the maximum speed and if i let any of it go by so means i shall slow down the general availability to diabetics anywhere and the reply came to me in simple terms all i can say is god bless the medical research council and the little girl died and i felt the strain of that human need and the emotional crisis