Researchers have found a new test subject that portrays signs of diabetes very similar to human diabetes. This new subject, the bottle nose dolphin, experiences drastic changes in glucose, or sugar, levels just like human beings with diabetes experience. Due to this, researchers believe that they will be able to study "dolphin diabetes" in order to discover new and very important advances in human diabetes. One day, according to this article, researchers hope that by studying the blood-glucose levels of dolphins, they will be able to find a cure for this terrible disease.
I believe this discovery is extremely important, and unfortunately, not many people know about it. For example, one of my best friends (who has diabetes) doesn't even know. Therefore, I really hope that this new discovery will find its way to the major news distributers. Then, these researchers would be able to receive more funding, and they will get even closer to finding the cure.
Here's the link: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/02/dolphin-diabetes-could-be-import.html
It's sad to think that we can just "use" other mammals for research because humans are too precious to do experiments on. Dolphins are very important to our environment, and I would hate to hear that people are killing them for research. I just don't like the thought of humans using other animals for their advancement. We should leave dolphins alone and research diabetes on ourselves. The information we could collect from humans would be the best data we would receive on diabetes.
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