When vanadium almost changed how we treat type 2 diabetes

Just after I achieved tenure in 1990, I received a letter in the campus mail from the dean of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), John McNeill, asking me to meet him for lunch at the Faculty Club. John was a world renowned expert in the diabetic heart, and alongside his letter was a reprint of his 1985 Science paper on the effect of sodium vanadate on elevated blood glucose and depressed cardiac performance in diabetic rats. As a newly tenured faculty member, you take this kind of invitation very seriously.