Diabetes and Free Enterprise

There are very few things that will make me bike 20 miles in the south Texas heat and wind, but last April I not only did that, but paid for the privilege.  My husband is a great bicyclist, me, not so much.  But Tom loves biking and I love Tom so we are both part of a group that rides every Tuesday.  But that isn’t why I was on that 20 mile ride.  That reason was juvenile diabetes.  The ride was to raise money for Type I diabetes, also known as juvenile or early onset diabetes.  This is the insulin dependent form of the disease, usually acquired in childhood and totally unrelated to weight or lifestyle.  The American Diabetes Association is my charity of choice. 

My youngest sister walks for breast cancer.   Two good friends work every Saturday at the local food bank.  A lady in my bridge club does accounting and legal work for the elderly.   Most of us have a charity of choice and it usually is one that strikes close to home.  Juvenile diabetes took the life of a member of my family and I will be very happy when this disease is conquered.  We are getting close.   One of the things that I credit for our progress on diabetes is the American free enterprise system of.  This was brought immediately home to me when I read an article in the weekend paper. 

I am going to quote liberally from this article by Thomas H. Maugh II, writing for the Los Angeles Times.  It seems that preliminary experiments show considerable hope for an inexpensive vaccine to reverse the effects of diabetes.  Type I is an inherited, autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas.  Type I is a fatal disease unless treated by insulin.  But now, a tuberculosis vaccine called BCG prevents destruction of the insulin-secreting cells.  It allows the pancreas to regenerate and begin producing insulin. 

A team of doctors and scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital, behaving with all of the transparency, testing and doubting that come with true science presented their work at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego.  There work has been slow to be accepted and that is fine with them.  But now, six different labs have duplicated their work with mice and humans.  The vaccine shows a temporary but statistically significant elevation in insulin producing cells.  It is being called a possibly phenomenal finding.  I certainly hope so.

This is the kind of thing that comes from American ingenuity.   This economy is based on the idea of building a better mouse trap.  Alone with this goes the desire to be free and certainly that means, among all of its forms, freedom from the tyranny of disease.  We come from a long line of people who consider facing the unknown a fair trade for the possibility of reward.  This makes us risk takers and explorers.  We discover things.  If you are a doctor, you discover medical things. 

You can not mandate creativity.  You can not rent control problem solving.  You can not form a bureau of, “let’s keep trying ‘til we get it right.”   What turns this country into a font of innovation is an inherent affinity for problem solving tied to a profit motive.   True, the team at Massachusetts General undoubtedly has a humanitarian desire to cure a terrible disease, they may even have accepted government money to help the research, but what drives them is a pure American desire to succeed and receive the approbation of their countrymen.  I wish them luck, but in this country we need very little of that.