“... if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time."
Dean Kamert
The insulin pump is a small, battery-powered device that releases varying amounts of insulin into the bloodstream of diabetics. Diabetes is a disease that affects the body's ability to break down sugar, caused by an absence or insensitivity to the hormone insulin. Until the invention of the insulin pump, the only way for diabetics to control their disease was to inject themselves daily with insulin. The first insulin pump was invented by Dr. Arnold Kadish in the 1960s, but it was so large it had to be worn like a backpack.
While Dean Kamen (b. 1951) was at college, his brother, then a medical student , approached him with a problem. He complained that there was no way to provide patients with steady doses of drugs, such as insulin. In response, Kamen constructed a circuit that controlled a small pump of insulin connected to a syringe. He used a new form of microchip—which did not require much power—to control the circuit. The device was wearable and programmable and delivered small, precise doses of insulin over a long period of time, evening out the peaks and troughs of insulin levels associated with injections. Kamen's brother showed this device to his colleagues and they were immediately impressed. In 1976, Kamen founded his first company, Auto Syringes Inc., to market and manufacture the pumps.
