The statement in one of the early papers [68] on residual beta cells in chronic T1D patients that ‘most patients whose pancreata still contain insulin cells after a diabetes duration of 10 to 20 years, will retain these insulin cells for the rest of their lives’ should therefore perhaps be modified to allow for the possibility that the residual beta cells are in fact newly formed cells that have escaped apoptosis. This evidence concerns the gene INS and diabetes mellitus.