Other diabetic mice also cured, rub it in.

And there's this, from the New York Times, on different research toward a cure:

Three groups of scientists report today that they independently replicated a controversial finding: severely diabetic mice can recover on their own if researchers squelch an immune system attack that is causing the disease.

. . . .

"People just didn't believe it," said Dr. David Nathan, director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General and a longtime supporter of Dr. Faustman. "People said you can't cure diabetes."

But, Dr. Nathan added, "this shows that at least in mice it has been confirmed and reconfirmed and confirmed again."

The three new papers, by researchers at the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvard's Joslin Clinic are published today in Science. In every case, the investigators followed Dr. Faustman's procedures, injecting diabetic mice with Freund's Complete Adjuvant, a mixture of water, oil and parts of dead bacteria. It overstimulates the immune system cells that are attacking the pancreas, making those white blood cells self-destruct, effectively stopping the attack and allowing the pancreas to cure itself.

The different groups calculated their cure rates in different ways but all reported that a significant proportion, though less than half of the mice, were cured. In Dr. Faustman's experiments, 67 percent of the mice were cured.

Dr. John Buse, director of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of North Carolina, urged caution.

"There are two possibilities," Dr. Buse said. "This treatment works for mice but no derivation of it will ever work for humans. Or this is the paradigm leap that is necessary to find the cure for Type 1 diabetes."

"If I was a betting person, my guess is that it probably won't work in humans," Dr. Buse added, explaining that all too often in science what works in mice does not work in people.

"Freund's Complete Adjuvant"? That sounds like some 19th-century snakeoil therapy. "Sir, have you tried my Carbolic Smoke Ball? How about a sip of Freund's Complete Adjuvant?"