The Perpetual Five-Year Promise: Another Diabetes Cure That Might Actually Be Different
There’s a running joke in the Type 1 diabetes community that’s been going strong for at least two decades: “Don’t worry, a cure is just five years away!” It’s become such a reliable punchline that you could set your watch by it, except the watch never actually reaches zero.
So when I saw headlines about Stanford scientists curing Type 1 diabetes in mice—quickly followed by similar news from China—my immediate reaction was somewhere between cautious optimism and weary cynicism. The comments section on one discussion thread captured this perfectly, with someone who’s lived with T1 for 48 years wryly noting they’ve been hearing about that five-year timeline their entire adult life.
The Stanford research itself is genuinely fascinating, though the headline claiming they did it “without immune suppression” is doing some heavy lifting. When you actually dig into the methodology, they depleted T cells, used JAK inhibitors, and applied low-dose total body irradiation. That’s… well, that’s a lot. Someone in the discussion mentioned they’d been on a JAK inhibitor and experienced heart and cholesterol issues—the kind typically seen in people in their 50s. They were younger. That’s not exactly a walk in the park.
Here’s the thing though: I don’t want to be dismissive. Real progress in medical research rarely looks like a Hollywood montage where someone peers into a microscope and suddenly shouts “Eureka!” It’s messy, incremental, and often involves treatments that sound worse than the disease until they’re refined over years or decades. The fact that these researchers achieved 100% prevention of diabetes in the chimeric mice, with durable results and no graft-versus-host disease, is legitimately impressive. It’s a step forward, even if the current protocol involves more radiation and immune system manipulation than most humans would willingly sign up for.
What struck me most about the online discussion was the gallows humour from the T1 community itself. “Congrats to all the diabetic mice!” someone quipped. Another pointed out that it’s “a great time to be a mouse”—before being swiftly reminded that these mice are specifically bred to develop diabetes and are culled after the study anyway. Dark? Absolutely. But there’s something profoundly human about that kind of humour in the face of chronic illness.
The timing of both the Chinese and American announcements within days of each other raised some eyebrows, with conspiracy theories about pharmaceutical companies briefly floating around. But honestly, this is just how scientific progress works. Multiple teams around the world work on similar problems using similar foundational knowledge. It’s happened throughout history—Newton and Leibniz with calculus, Darwin and Wallace with evolution, the near-simultaneous development of mRNA vaccines. When you’re pushing at the bleeding edge of what’s possible, convergence is inevitable.
What frustrates me—and I think this is worth expressing—is how these breakthroughs get packaged for public consumption. The headlines promise miracles while the fine print reveals complex, sometimes brutal treatments that are nowhere near ready for human application. People living with diabetes, particularly parents of children with T1, ride an emotional rollercoaster with each announcement. Hope is important, but so is honesty about where we actually are in the process.
Still, I want to end on a note that’s genuinely optimistic rather than performatively so. Someone mentioned Cystic Fibrosis patients who never expected to live past their 30s suddenly having to plan for futures they didn’t think they’d have. Medical breakthroughs do happen. They’re just slower and messier than we’d like.
The five-year countdown might be a joke now, but one day it won’t be. The question is whether we can maintain reasonable expectations while still funding and celebrating the unglamorous, incremental work that actually gets us there. And maybe, just maybe, we can write headlines that don’t oversell the science while underselling the complexity.
Because somewhere between the hype and the cynicism, there are real scientists doing real work that might actually change lives. Even if the mice aren’t having quite as good a time as the headlines suggest.