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History

Hypoglycemia was first discovered by James Collip when he was working with Frederick Banting on purifying insulin in 1922. Collip was asked to develop an assay to measure the activity of insulin. He first injected insulin into a rabbit, and then measured the reduction in blood-glucose levels. Measuring blood glucose was a time-consuming step. Collip observed that if he injected rabbits with a too large a dose of insulin, the rabbits began convulsing, went into a coma, and then died. This observation simplified his assay. He defined one unit of insulin as the amount necessary to induce this convulsing hypoglycemic reaction in a rabbit. Collip later found he could save money, and rabbits, by injecting them with glucose once they were convulsing.