On the Immense Variety and Complexity of Circumstances Conditioning Pancreatic β-Cell Apoptosis in Type 1 Diabetes

摘要

In his masterpiece War and Peace (1869), Leo Tolstoy wrote: "The human intellect with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived as the cause of it, snatches at the first and the most easily understood approximation, and says: 'Oh, here is the cause!'" The field of type 1 diabetes has been plagued by this trend for oversimplification. As a result, individual pathways are often suggested as "the cause" of this complex, multifactorial, and probably heterogeneous disease, thereby leading to therapeutic attempts that nearly alwavs end in failure.