A question I'd really love to ask is: 'Will people with diabetes like my father ever be able to stop taking insulin completely?' I'm a twenty-nine-year-old bank officer in Chittagong, and my dad has had type one diabetes since he was a teenager.
The expert I'd ask is a specialist researcher in diabetes, someone who works on new treatments rather than a normal doctor. Our family doctor is lovely, but when we ask big questions about the future, he usually smiles and says research is moving quickly, which isn't really an answer.
I suppose I'd contact them through a university. A lot of researchers now give public talks online, and some have question sessions at the end, so I could send my question there. Or I might write a short, polite email explaining my father's situation. I'd probably ask my English teacher to check it first.
I want to know the answer for personal and practical reasons. My father has been injecting insulin several times a day for over forty years. He never complains, but I've seen how tiring it is, especially when he travels or gets ill. I've read headlines about cell transplants and devices that work like an artificial pancreas, but I can't tell which stories are realistic and which are just exaggeration. An expert could tell me what's actually likely in the next ten or twenty years. Even if the answer is 'not yet', it would help my family plan, and it would stop me getting false hope every time I see a dramatic news story online.