Diabetes is a devastating disease which takes an enormous toll on both human life and healthcare spending worldwide.  Dr. Frances Ashcroft begins her talk by explaining that blood glucose must be controlled within narrow limits. In a healthy person, insulin is released from the pancreatic beta cells in response to a rise in blood sugar, which stimulates the uptake of glucose into muscle, liver and fat and so restores the blood glucose to its resting level. Diabetes occurs when the beta cells do not release enough insulin, resulting in chronically high blood sugar levels.  There are several types of diabetes: type 1 occurs because the beta cells are damaged by autoimmune attack; type 2, the most common form, is usually due to a combination of insulin resistance and decreased insulin secretion and is exacerbated by obesity and age; monogenic diabetes results from a mutation in a single gene.   Neonatal diabetes is a rare monogenic form of diabetes that presents at, or shortly after, birth. Ashcroft explains that in 1984, she and her colleagues found that the function of an ATP-sensitive potassium channel (KATP channel) in the plasma membrane of pancreatic beta cells is critical for linking increased blood glucose levels to insulin secretion. They postulated that a mutation that caused the KATP channel to be permanently open would impair insulin release.  Twenty years later, these mutations were identified and shown to be the cause of neonatal diabetes.