Extending the hospital stay of a 57 year old man 57 days.
If you saw any video of his quality of life of his last days struggling to breathe, the only ones who would conclude it was worth it, would be a surgeon with both a boat payment and country club membership coming due at the same time.
The transplant was approved because the man was near death and no alternative was available so he volunteered for the process.
Here's a brief summary of how insulin was discovered.
"In 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best figured out how to remove insulin from a dog's pancreas. Skeptical colleagues said the stuff looked like "thick brown muck," but little did they know this would lead to life and hope for millions of people with diabetes.
With this murky concoction, Banting and Best kept another dog with severe diabetes alive for 70 days—the dog died only when there was no more extract. With this success, the researchers, along with the help of colleagues J.B. Collip and John Macleod, went a step further. A more refined and pure form of insulin was developed, this time from the pancreases of cattle.
In January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying from diabetes in a Toronto hospital, became the first person to receive an injection of insulin. Within 24 hours, Leonard's dangerously high blood glucose levels dropped to near-normal levels.
Insulin from cattle and pigs was used for many years to treat diabetes and saved millions of lives, but it wasn't perfect, as it caused allergic reactions in many patients. The first genetically engineered, synthetic "human" insulin was produced in 1978 using E. coli bacteria to produce the insulin. Eli Lilly went on in 1982 to sell the first commercially available biosynthetic human insulin under the brand name Humulin."
