THE MAN WHO GAVE INSULIN TO THE WORLD

Table of Contents

FREDERICK BANTING

As a struggling young surgeon from rural Ontario with no research training and a mountain of personal debt, Frederick changed a deadly reality within the space of a single year. Before 1921, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was effectively a death sentence. Working with a medical student in John Macleod's laboratory space, Banting helped isolate insulin, transforming diabetes from a fatal illness into a manageable chronic condition and saving hundreds of millions of lives in the century since.

A World War I veteran and combat surgeon who had been awarded the Military Cross for treating wounded soldiers under fire, he returned to Canada and set up a private practice that failed to attract patients. To make ends meet, he took a lecturing post at the University of Western Ontario, where in October 1920 he read an article describing how tying off the pancreatic duct in animals caused the insulin-producing tissue to survive while the digestive-enzyme-producing tissue withered. Banting believed this technique could let him isolate the pancreatic secretion that controlled blood sugar without it being destroyed by the pancreas's own digestive enzymes. He brought the idea to Macleod, a physiology professor at the University of Toronto, who was skeptical but granted him lab space, ten dogs, and a student assistant named Charles Best for the summer of 1921.

Banting and Best tied off the pancreatic ducts of dogs, waited for the tissue to degenerate, then extracted and injected the resulting fluid into diabetic dogs, watching their blood sugar fall. Biochemist James Collip joined the team to purify the extract enough for human use, and in January 1922 a dying fourteen-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson became the first person treated with insulin at Toronto General Hospital. His blood sugar dropped to near-normal levels, and within weeks other diabetic children who had been kept alive on starvation diets, some weighing barely more than skeletons, began to recover their strength. The transformation was so rapid and visible that it became one of the most dramatic moments in the history of medicine.

In 1923, at 32, he became the youngest Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, sharing the prize with Macleod, a decision that infuriated Banting, who felt Macleod had contributed administrative oversight rather than real scientific insight. Banting and the University of Toronto also made an unusual choice for the era; rather than exploit the patent for profit, they sold the insulin patent to the university for a single dollar, wanting the treatment to remain affordable and widely available, a decision credited with accelerating insulin's global manufacture and distribution.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.