Until insulin arrived in 1922, type 1 diabetes was effectively a death sentence.
People with type 1 diabetes usually died within months of diagnosis, and doctors' best treatment was a near-starvation diet. Then, in a Toronto lab in 1921, a young surgeon, Frederick Banting, and a student, Charles Best, found a way to extract insulin. Within a year, dying patients were recovering.
By 1920, researchers suspected that diabetes came from the lack of a hormone made by the islets of Langerhans, small clusters of cells in the pancreas. The hormone had even been given a name, insulin, and was thought to control how the body handles sugar. But nobody could extract it. When the pancreas was ground up, its own protein-digesting enzymes appeared to destroy the hormone before it could be collected.
Banting was a surgeon struggling to build a practice in London, Ontario, when, preparing a lecture, he read a 1920 paper by Moses Barron. Tying off the pancreatic duct, it described, caused the enzyme-producing cells to waste away while leaving the islets intact. Banting saw the opening: let those cells die, then extract the insulin. He took the idea to John Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto, who gave him lab space and a student assistant, Charles Best. The biochemist James Collip later joined them.
Working first with dogs, and then with pancreases from calves and adult animals from a slaughterhouse, they produced active extracts. On 11 January 1922 a teenage boy, Leonard Thompson, received the first insulin injection at Toronto General Hospital. Impurities in that first dose caused an allergic reaction, but a refined extract followed twelve days later and his health improved rapidly. Pork and beef pancreases remained the main source of insulin until genetically engineered bacteria took over late in the twentieth century.
The 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting and Macleod. Banting shared his half of the prize money with Best, and Macleod shared his with Collip. At 32, Banting is still the youngest Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine. He died after a plane crash in Newfoundland in 1941. His birthday, 14 November, is now World Diabetes Day, and a 'Flame of Hope' burns in London, Ontario, to be put out only when a cure is found.
Source: Wikipedia — Frederick Banting · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
