Starting in 1884, Abel worked with doctors Ludwig von Frey in physiology and histology, Rudolf Boehm in pharmacology, Adolph Strümpell in pathology, and Johannes Wislicenus in organic and inorganic chemistry.

[2] Ever since his early years in Europe, Abel showed great interest in isolating pure form of internal gland hormones.

While he was improving his processes on decomposing the benzoyl derivative to obtain salts of epinephrine using saponification, a Japanese chemist J. Takamine, who had visited his lab, was able to successfully isolate the neutral base of epinephrine by adding ammonium to highly concentrated extract, a method Abel himself tried but failed due to the use of low concentration of extract.

[9] After Takamine's success, Abel himself remarked, with great candor, "The efforts of years on my part in this once mysterious field of suprarenal, medullary biochemistry, marred by blunders as they were, eventuated, then, in the isolation of the hormone not in the form of the free base but in that of its monobenzoyl derivative.

Not only did Abel use the apparatus for his research work, he also realized the great clinical potential such dialysis machine would have on managing the damaging effects of renal failure.

He summarized his work in a paper published in 1913, "On the Removal of Diffusable Substances from the Circulating Blood by Means of Dialysis" by Transfusion Science.

The discovery not only significantly precipitated progress on extracting active fractions but also offered the very first concrete information on the structure of insulin—sulfur is an integral part of insulin molecules.

[12] While at the California Institute of Technology, Abel completed an article in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "Crystalline Insulin" in 1926.

[13] Although Abel's work received great compliments from the media and the science community, some doubted the purity of his crystals as preliminary tests revealed that they were in fact proteins.

[12] The test result was contrary to the dominant view at the time on proteins—proteins were considered as unlikely to have such highly specific physiological activity shown by a hormone such as insulin.

[12] In 1927, he was published in the journal Science for this work with a paper entitled "Chemistry in Relation to Biology and Medicine with Especial Reference to Insulin and Other Hormones".

As more and more research was conducted in the field of biochemistry, Abel realized the importance of having a platform that allowed scientists all around the world to publish their work and report on their findings.

[9] Motivated by the very same goal of trying to create an outlet for a wide dissemination of new scientific findings, he later founded the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics in 1908.