Nicolae Constantin Paulescu şi descoperirea insulinei
Nicolae Constantin Paulescu and the discovery of insulin

Summary/Abstract: Nicolae Constantin Paulescu who did some work on pancreine (a pancreatic extract containing insulin). The „pancreine” was an extract of bovine pancreas in salted water, after which some impurities were removed with hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide. In the autumn of1888, Paulescu left for Paris, where he enrolled in medical school. In 1897he graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree, and was immediately appointed as assistant surgeon at the Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours Hospital. In 1900, Paulescu returned to Romania, where he remained until his death (1931) as Head of the Physiology Department of the University of Bucharest Medical School, as well as a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the St. Vincent de Paul Hospital in Bucharest. In 1916, he succeeded in developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels. From 24 April to 23 June 1921, Paulescu published four papers at the Romanian Section of the Society of Biology in Paris: 1. The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a diabetic animal byway of the blood. 2. The influence of the time elapsed from the intravenous pancreatic injection into a diabetic animal. 3. The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a normal animal byway of the blood.An extensive paper on this subject – Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation – was submitted by Paulescu on 22 June to the Archives Internationales de Physiologie in Liège, Belgium, and was published in the August 1921 issue of this journal. Paulescu then secured the patent rights for his method of manufacturing insulin on 10 April 1922 (patent no. 6254) from the Romanian Ministry of Industry and Trade. In 1990,he was elected posthumously as member of the Romanian Academy.In 1993, the Institute of Diabetes, Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases in Bucharest was named in his honor (Institute of Diabetes, Nutrition and Metabolic Disease „N. C. Paulescu”).

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