Morris White (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA) had a message that went down well at a signaling conference. Two major misconceptions about diabetes, he said, can be corrected by putting more emphasis on signaling pathways.
White talked primarily about type II (late-onset) diabetes, which has traditionally been ascribed to insulin resistance in peripheral tissues, as insulin is still detected in the blood. “That's ingrained in the field: you get fat; you get old; you make your [pancreatic] β cells work too hard,” said White. “But the global view of our work is that β cells don't get tired if the signaling is right.”
White contests the vague notion that pancreatic β cells—the body's only source of insulin—get exhausted from trying to pump out enough insulin to meet the demands of the peripheral tissues. As one of his counter-examples, he cites the rare patients with mutant...
