– 17 July 1931) was a Romanian physiologist, professor of medicine, and politician, most famous for his work on diabetes, including patenting pancreine (a pancreatic extract containing insulin).

Paulescu was also, with A. C. Cuza, co-founder of the National Christian Union and later, of the National-Christian Defense League, an early ultranationalist and anti-Semitic Romanian party.

In 1916, he succeeded in developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels.

[4] The method used by Paulescu to prepare his pancreatic extract was similar to a procedure described by the American researcher Israel Kleiner in an article published two years earlier, in 1919, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

In February 1922, doctor Frederick Banting and biochemist John Macleod from the University of Toronto, Canada, published their paper on the successful use of a different, alcohol-based pancreatic extract for normalizing blood sugar (glucose) levels (glycemia) in a human patient.

The Toronto team felt confident in the purity of their insulin and injected it intravenously into the patient, clearing up his glycosuria and ketonuria and restoring normal blood sugar.

In contrast, the Toronto team had known for several months that dogs could be placed into a diabetic coma by an overdose of insulin, so they prepared orange juice and candy for the clinical trials.

In an article for a 1971 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Murray wrote: "Insufficient recognition has been given to Paulesco, the distinguished Roumanian scientist, who at the time when the Toronto team were commencing their research had already succeeded in extracting the antidiabetic hormone of the pancreas and proving its efficacy in reducing the hyperglycaemia in diabetic dogs.

"[6]"In a recent private communication Professor Tiselius, head of the Nobel Institute, has expressed his personal opinion that Paulesco was equally worthy of the award in 1923.

"[7]Paulescu has been criticized for his political activity centered on antisemitic views and eugenism,[8] which found their expression also in articles such as The Judeo-Masonic plot against the Romanian nation (expressed in his book, Philosophic Physiology: The Hospital, the Koran, the Talmud, the Kahal and Freemasonry[9]): We Romanians are faced with a capital question: What shall we do with these uninvited guests who suddenly installed themselves in this country, or rather, with these evil parasites who are both thieves and assassins?

He singles out for their low brain weight the Nobel Prize laureates Anatole France (non-Jewish), Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson.

[citation needed] His starting point was a theory of passions and of social conflicts examined from the angle of a discipline he called "philosophical physiology".

It was illustrated, in the main, by the behavior of Jews, who represented the extreme case of a race ruled by two essential passions: the instincts of domination and ownership.

[14]: 28 Following protests from several Jewish organizations, the inauguration of Professor Paulescu's bust at the Hôtel-Dieu State Hospital in Paris, scheduled for 27 August 2003, had to be cancelled.