The Start of Something Good: The Discovery of HbA1c and the American Diabetes Association Samuel Rahbar Outstanding Discovery Award

Sometimes, a scientific achievement merits its own prize. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) acknowledged Samuel Rahbar, MD, PhD, with just such an honor—the Samuel Rahbar Outstanding Discovery Award—for a contribution to the study and treatment of diabetes that resonates to this day. Rahbar is the person who discovered that HbA1c is elevated in people with diabetes. This breakthrough came in 1968 and was not immediately appreciated broadly, but over the next few decades HbA1c became arguably the most important indicator of blood glucose control, enabling doctor and patient to, for the first time, critically assess the impact of lifestyle changes and medication on long-term health (Table 1). View this table: Table 1 HbA1c: a history Rahbar was born in 1929 in Tehran the youngest of seven children. “My mother was a teacher at a French school,” he says. “My father had a small shop selling fabrics, but my mother was the pillar of our house. We were all educated.” Rahbar became highly educated indeed, receiving both a medical degree and a doctorate at the University of Tehran. He stayed there for his postdoctoral studies as well. By then, it was the 1960s, and hemoglobin was the rising star of molecular biology. Rahbar started his fellowship in 1962 with plans to study immunoglobulins. However, shortly into his fellowship, he became interested in protein structure and “discovered hemoglobin was the molecule du jour,” he says. Not only was hemoglobin easy to come by (making up 97% of erythrocytes’ dry weight) but in 1960, it became one of the first proteins to have its structure solved (1). That gave researchers unprecedented insight into the connection between a protein’s structure and its function. Linus Pauling, working on the protein from another angle, discovered that the hemoglobin of people with sickle cell anemia (HbS) was …