Communist China Just Cured Diabetes and America's Insulin Industry is Not Happy About it
5 months ago by theHRguy to c/latestagecapitalism
Have you ever heard of Tofu buildings? A bunch of Chinese construction companies have been using unwashed beach sand in their concrete. This means there's salt in the concrete.
So you can walk up to some of these buildings and with just a little effort, rip a chunk off with your bare hands.
The companies are still doing it, because it's cheaper, and they rarely get in trouble. It's a sign of Chinese capitalism, reckless disregard for harm done in the name of profit. The US went through a phase like that from about 1607 until we all died in nuclear hellfire during the Able Archer exercises in 1983.
The companies are still doing it, because it’s cheaper, and they rarely get in trouble. It’s a sign of Chinese capitalism, reckless disregard for harm done in the name of profit.
80% of the sand used in their construction is now artificial... Because they stopped using unwashed sand.
It took me less than 5 minutes to find this out with a simple search.
'fun' read about able archer though.
That’s just drywall. Interior wall cladding isn’t really structural in American building. But being able to punch through brick or concrete would be wildly concerning, even for Americans.
I get where you're coming from, but I'm also skeptical about the results. How do they get the body to stop attacking the pancreas permanently?
Until enough data is collected patients may just go right back down the line. It isn't an instant process.
How the Therapy Works
The process involves regenerative medicine, utilizing the patient's own body's capabilities to treat the illness.
Cell Extraction: A small sample of cells (e.g., fat cells or blood cells) is taken from the patient. Reprogramming: These cells are chemically treated in a lab to revert them to a pluripotent state, meaning they can develop into any type of cell.
Differentiation and Transplantation: The stem cells are then guided to become functional, insulin-producing islet cells. These new cells are then transplanted back into the patient's abdominal area.
Restored Function: Once implanted, the cells engraft and begin producing insulin naturally in response to blood glucose levels, effectively restoring the body's natural ability to regulate blood sugar.
That doesn't make sense for type 2. This is exactly how they've been trialing treatment of type 1, they just announced it a few months ago I think it was Stanford and Toronto
Insulin producing cells die off in type 2 after years of being bombarded with sugar in the US diet.
Also known as sugars
I wonder if the US diabetic population is comparable to the Chinese diabetic population. Similar weight and eating habits? If not that could complicate things.
Rate of diabetes in China “explosive”
China has the world's largest diabetes population, with over 118 million adults (approx. 11–12% prevalence) living with the disease as of late 2024–2025, driven by rapid urbanization, obesity, and an aging population. The epidemic has shifted dramatically from less than 1% prevalence in 1980 to a major public health challenge, with type 2 diabetes accounting for over 90% of cases
This is a consistent pattern in Chinese domestic politics. What a western nation would pick out as a profit center, the Chinese state addresses as a social cost. So the state plows a small fortune into cost-effective medical solutions, rather than squeezing the existing health care system out for therapeutic remedies that never resolve the root problem.
This is a consistent pattern in Chinese domestic politics
What are other examples?
It should be noted that this treatment sounds likely to be very expensive, and also if someone doesn't change their lifestyle, the newly implanted functional cells are likely to become dysfunctional again over time, requiring another expensive cycle of treatment
What are other examples?
Environmental policy was a big one. China took a hard pivot in the '00s, cutting emissions, advancing alternative energy, reforesting deserts, rapidly advancing HSR, building enormous wild life refugees.
Their insourcing of processors was another. Going from Taiwan's biggest customer to it's biggest competitor in a decade and change.
Then there was the housing boom - remember "Chinese Ghost Towns"? All over the news in the early '10s. Now China has more homeowners than any other county on Earth with more than 90% of households owning at least one property.
This isn't a cure for type 2, it's a cure for type 1. Lifestyle has very little effect on type 1. You just don't have enough insulin, sometimes you don't have any, and usually it's a result of an autoimmune disease or genetic issue.
This treatment is for type 1 (still 12 million cases).
I believe you may conflating type 1, and type 2. Type 1 does not have a causal relationship with food consumption. The article also might be conflating the two as it mentions curing type 2, but by using the methodology everyone has been looking into to treat the autoimmune issues of type 1s.
Multiple types are autoimmune. Doesn't the body continue to attack the cells?
This was one test in one patient. We didn't hear about the patients where this didn't work. Very shitty article.
Well shit. At least I wasn't willing to get my hopes up.
The concept is being trialed worldwide, but it will be too expensive for anyone
I love how you call it Communist China when it's just as run-by-oligarchs as the US is. In fact they made an oligarch president for life.
It's not communist, it's socialist with Chinese characteristics! (The characteristics are oligarchs)
It's not communist, it's socialist with Chinese characteristics! (The characteristics are oligarchs)
Not for the 400m Chinese earning $40 USD a month.
It's work till you die with no health care or social security.
Not to mention the tens of millions of unregistered (citizenless) girls who are enslaved to work the world's biggest sex markets
Ok, I'd really like to see a source for these claims because as far as I know the minimum salary is more than $200 everywhere in the country and the average is way higher. It might be work till you die, that I won't deny that, but they also do have social security and health care, to a degree that an US citizen would be jealous of.
my summary of china is that they have come to the genius conclusion that you actually have to feed your livestock if you want milk, which is something many other countries seem to have great difficulty comprehending.
Pretty big claims to make without any source or citation haha
Shhhhhhhh! Don't you know facts and evidence are tools of capitalist oppression!
And it's in Nature, a journal famous for high profile studies that are poorly peer reviewed and rarely reproduced.
It's one patient, thus this is an anecdotal report.
South China Morning Post: https://www.scmp.com/...
That's not any more reliable. Maybe a scientific paper or something?
My cousin Doug's girlfriend?
Terrible hype article. This was one person. And, it's not unique, similar trials are taking place worldwide. But the US based development was all killed with the NIH cuts.
Sure thing, but I think that was the whole point of the article. It's not staying that America isn't enough technologically advanced to achieve that, but that nobody wants to do that because it would kill a huge industry
This "cure" was from 2024, per the South China Morning Post.
In case anyone was thinking this was new.
Any news on it since then? It wouldn't be the first time a scientific achievement out of China that embarrasses The West just fizzled out when no one was looking.
Is it really an achievement if it fizzles out?
A real groundbreaking achievement may travel slow, but it will stay steady since it actively improves lives. People will keep talking about it.
Unlike, lets say, propaganda. That goes fast and fizzles out faster.
We should be able to check if the amount of diabetes in China falls down rapidly.
It is if the results were falsified. Even it it worked somewhat, they're probably greatly over stating the effectiveness or ability to scale to a mass population.
I remember years back, China solved world hunger by growing mushrooms in caves. I can't find anything on that anymore, but I still have a friend listing that accomplishment.
Ohhh nice... where is Communist China again... ?
I know where the State Capitalist Chinese Dictatorship is, but yeah, can't find the Communist one.
Hell, they aren't even fully State Capitalist anymore, they have billionaires.
Still, if this is true, and widely available, it could be one of the handful of good things done by a bad government. Hell, even if the methods are released for others to improve on, it would be a boon for the world.
There are close to 2 million children with type 1 diabetes worldwide. And I guess there are like 8 million adults, whatever. Cure the kids, let them not die when someone hands them a candy bar.
That is, if this works. Type 1 is usually an autoimmune disease. Do doctors first need to cure the autoimmune disease and then give this treatment? If so, then this is just another temporary treatment for now. Possibly in the range of days if the immune response is particularly aggressive.
This was a single case involving type 2 diabetes. Type 1 would need to be approached differently because it can't be cured by fixing the pancreas. If this therapy does work, perhaps it would still be a boon for T1 patients as a treatment rather than a cure.
Looks horrible!
Who said anything about how it looks?
Shanghai is a global financial center, ranking third in Asia and eighth globally on the Global Financial Centres Index.[139] Shanghai is also a large hub of the Chinese and global technology industry and home to a large startup ecosystem. As of 2021, the city was ranked as the 2nd Fintech powerhouse in the world after New York City.[140]
As of 2019, the Shanghai Stock Exchange had a market capitalization of US$4.02 trillion, making it the largest stock exchange in China and the fourth-largest stock exchange in the world.[141] In 2009, the trading volume of six key commodities—including rubber, copper, and zinc—on the Shanghai Futures Exchange all ranked first globally.[142] By the end of 2017, Shanghai had 1,491 financial institutions, of which 251 were foreign-invested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai
Shanghai is about as communist as Wall Street. It should look nice, they certainly have the money for it.
I agree with most of the points regarding how how China does/would treat a diabetes cure in comparison to China, this post (it's not an article) is garbage. It's got no sources, just vaguely references a single case.
It would be a better post if it didn't mention China at all and instead discussed how diabetes is approached under American capitalism.
People shouldn’t have to hope that Chinese scientists cure diabetes just so American companies can’t keep price gouging them. But here we are.
here we are indeed
It's a substack page, where they praise themselves for their "award winning journalism" so I would take this article with a massive grain of salt.
Lots of liver transplant recipients get off the wagon.
IIRC the biologist that runs the YT channel Though Emporium did this some years ago regarding his lactose intolerance and he had to get more after some years because his body didn't naturally produce them
But I hope this is different
This is blatantly incorrect to a degree that i'd call it an outright lie, spending 30 seconds looking it up would show you that his video is literally titled "I Genetically Engineered MYSELF to Fix Lactose Intolerance".
lactose intolerance is a very very different thing from diabetes.
Insulin is a fundamental part of keeping you alive, and if you fuck up the balance you can die which is why diabetes is such a big deal.
Lactose intolerance is just the inability to digest a specific kind of sugar, which means bacteria in your digestive system can gorge themselves and give you an absurd amount of gas and other very unpleasant but ultimately not particularly dangerous consequences.
wasn't the original inventor of insulin insistent that it remain cheap and readily available?
Banting and Best sold the patent for $1. But they were Canadian.
The cost of insulin has nothing to do with intellectual property.
The current price of insulin is still directly affected by patents. Yes, they are still getting patents 100 years later with analogs and biosimilars.
We certainly could manufacture the original formula for cheap, but no one wants to do that. Capitalism and intellectual property combined are the culprits.
The government could fix this a number of ways, but it hasn't.
They could have run a non-profit organization that leases out access to the patent, with conditions on pricing and availability. IMO, the pair thought that a for-profit health industry would do the right thing, and were betrayed by the rich bastards of society.
Not entirely obvious, but this is what the substack referenced: https://interestingengineering.com/...
Ahhhhh riiight "communist" china. In the same group as the "anti-nazi russia" and "democratic usa"
Lmao yeah China is a capitalist dynasty
B-but they arrest billionaires sometimes and have social welfare! That's what communism is, right?
No.
I do believe that HIV will happen soon, but curing cancer is a lot like curing the common cold. Even if you cure one strain, there are still hundreds more with the same end result. Cancer is just the umbrella term for a particular type of cellular behavior, but there are a lot of different types, causes, etc and treatments will vary for each.
To be clear, this isn’t some nihilistic doomer “why even bother trying” type of post. Modern medicine has already made great strides in curing several different kinds of specific cancers. But a cure for one cancer will not really equate to “curing cancer”, because there will still be countless others.
china wouldve been comporable, if they had not just fudge thier numbers, experiments in biological research all the time and make claims that cant be backed up. CCP is quite insular when it comes to research that hasnt been reverse engineered.
A book I was just reading talked about the pluripotent cells and using them for medical treatments. The author was talking to a US lab but then their work was cancelled due to funding cuts. Doesn't surprise me that China is taking up the slack.
What's AI generated? The story is hallucinations? Or a fake post created by a prompt to it? Real story but written by AI? AI graphics?
On the thread there are some links to studies doing the same or similar, so I wouldn't just assume its a lie. The article makes my skepticism go on high alert though
I don't like the people who claim everything bad is AI created. They act like as if shit journalism and media wasn't a thing before AI existed.
No I mean it’s literally AI generated. I am super confident. I work on these models on a daily basis so I know it when I see it. Sorry that doesn’t fit into your preconceived worldview.
AI detectors don’t work on the latest generation, they’re all trained on older open source models. You can usually tell AI generated stuff by the em dashes, the tone, and the contrast-driven sentence structure.
E.g. the most AI generated sentence is “That’s not being rude—that’s self-care .”
This one looks like Grok. It has a tendency to generate short sentences and pithy one liners like “Let that sink in.”
No, you cannot tell AI by use of emdashes and this common claim just makes people look even more illiterate than they already did. Real people use emdashes and we're not going to stop.
Real people also like to use short sentences to make them more impactful.
The LLMs "learned" these from humans, after all.
You write with too much confidence, I think. I work on these models professionally so I don’t know what to tell you besides your surface level understanding of LLMs seems wrong. 🤷♀️
Models do use emdashes disproportionately often, along with shorter sentences than the average human, because they are trained with RLHF where humans rate the model outputs based on their preferences. This is different than copying human behavior as you suggested they do. With RLHF (and later more efficient methods), humans tended to rate models that used emdashes and that had shorter, matter of fact sentences higher because it projected more confidence. In fact, models that were confidently wrong were more likely to be rated higher than models that were unconfidently correct.
Sources cited:
- https://surgehq.ai/blog/lmarena-is-a-plague-on-ai
- https://ai.stackexchange.com/...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Respectfully, if you do the stereotypical armchair expert thing and double down, I will block you. I don’t have the patience to deal with people incorrectly mansplaining my own field to me. I just want to spread knowledge.
If aliens came to trade cheap stuff with USA, oligarchist supremacism would declare war on them no matter how badly we'd lose
Just because China got there first doesn't mean American companies aren't trying.
Curing patients is not a sustainable business model.
Your link actually demonstrates that the US may get there first. You linked a large scale clinical study in the US, whereas OP's article is a single case study. Also, OP's case study treated type 2 DM and explicitly noted that Type 1 will be more difficult to treat, while the study you linked is already targeting Type 1. Interested to see how the study you linked turns out!
Ah, that'll teach me for not reading the OP link
Sure...
.. Even after the gutting of the funding?
Look at their share prices
for a long time, different insulin types were only produced by a triopoly in the states, otherwise they would lose to cheaper generics, or competition if they were aggresively using competition, i think it changed now.
NOVO nordisk, ELLY lily, and sanofi were the primary producers.
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@lemmy.world
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
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2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
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They're getting new beautiful infrastructure and disease cures.
We're bringing back measles, coal mining, and actively stupefying our kids for profit.
USA! USA!
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