About 6,000 peer reviewed articles have been published on electrochemical glucose assays and sensors, of which 700 were published in the 2005-2006 two-year period. Their number makes a full review of the literature, or even of the most recent advances, impossible. Nevertheless, this review should acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of the electrochemistry of glucose and provide a perspective of the evolution of the electrochemical glucose assays and monitors helping diabetic people, who constitute about 5% of the world's population. Because of the large number of diabetic people, no assay is performed more frequently than that of glucose. Most of these assays are electrochemical. The reader interested also in nonelectrochemical assays used in, or proposed for, the management of diabetes is referred to a 2007 review of Kondepati and Heise. 1 Adam Heller was born in 1933. Surviving the Holocaust, he arrived in Israel in 1945. He received his M.Sc. in Chemistry and Physics in 1957, then his PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1961 from Ernst David Bergman at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He postdoced at UC Berkeley (1962-3) and at Bell Laboratories . At GTE Labs (1964-1975 he built the first Nd 3+ liquid laser and, with J. J. Auborn, the still worldwide used Li/SOCl 2 battery. At Bell Labs (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988) he designed the first >10% efficient electrochemical solar cells and the first >10% efficient hydrogengenerating solar-powered photoelectrode. He also headed Bell Labs' Electronic Materials Research Department (1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988), which developed part of the high density chip interconnection technology underlying the miniaturization of portable electronic devices. He was appointed to the Ernest Cockrell Sr. Chair in Engineering of the University of Texas at Austin in 1988, and in 2001 became one of UT's first Research Professors. At UT he pioneered the electrical wiring of enzymes. In 1996 he cofounded with his son Ephraim Heller TheraSense Inc., now part of Abbott Diabetes Care, to improve the lives of diabetic people. The company introduced in 2000 the blood sugar monitor FreeStyle, a thin-layer microcoulometer utilizing only 300 nL of blood, so little that it was, for the first time, painlessly obtained. In 2007 it provided for more than 1 billion painless glucose assays. After alleviating the pain of diabetes monitoring, FreeStyle Navigator, based on the electrical wiring of glucose oxidase, introduced in 2007 in Europe and Israel and in 2008 in the U.S., removed the worry of diabetic people by continuously monitoring their glucose levels. Heller aims his work at alleviating suffering through bioelectrochemistry.