Eva Saxl

Eva Saxl was born in 1921 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. During the WWII she and her hus-band, Victor Saxl, fled to Shanghai, China. In Shanghai Eva was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 the Japanese occupation of China was tightened, and soon all the pharmacies in Shanghai were closed, and Eva had no legal access to insulin. It was possible to buy insulin on the black market using one-ounce gold bars for payment. But that was not the safest option; one of Eva’s friends died from using the black market insulin.

Eventually, the Victor and Eva decided to get insulin another--highly unconventional--way: make it themselves. The book "Beckman's Internal Medicine" described the methods that Dr. Frederick Banting and Charles Best first used to extract insulin from the pancreases of dogs, calves, and cows in 1921.

A Chinese man lend them a small laboratory, where they attempted to extract insulin from pancreases of buffaloes. After much work, they finally produced a brown-coloured insulin. The insulin was tested on rabbits starved for twenty-four hours and then divided into two groups. One group was injected with the extracted mix, and the other with Eva’s insulin. Without equipment to test the rabbits’ urine or blood the best way Victor could test the potency of the insulin was to see if the rabbit’s experienced the same hypoglycaemic shock as the other rabbits. After testing the insulin on rabbits for more than a year, Eva was running out of conventional insulin and cautiously tried it on herself-–and it worked.

In the Jewish ghetto where they were living, many other people with type 1 diabetes were also in dire need of insulin. Eva gave her insulin to two boys in a nearby hospital who were in diabetic comas.

References

*citation
title=Eva's Insulin
first=R
last=Mclean
url=http://www.diabeteshealthnetwork.com/read,1012,3495.html
*citation
first=James
last=Hirsch
title=Cheating Destiny: Living with Diabetes, America’s biggest epidemic
year=2006
isbn=0618514619