Frederick Banting

By Lucía Cárdenas

He was an unknown country doctor with a hunch, and his hunch ended the death sentence of diabetes. Frederick Banting was born in 1891 on a farm in Alliston, Ontario, a mediocre student who failed his first year of medical school, served as a battalion surgeon in the First World War, and set up a struggling practice in London, Ontario. In October 1920, preparing a lecture on the pancreas, he read about dogs whose pancreatic ducts had been tied off — and at 2 a.m. he scribbled the idea that made him immortal: tie off the ducts, let the digestive enzymes wither, and extract the internal secretion that controls blood sugar. He talked his way into the laboratory of the great physiologist J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto, was given a student assistant, Charles Best, a handful of dogs, and the summer of 1921. It worked. By autumn they had an extract that lowered blood sugar in diabetic dogs; the biochemist James Collip purified it for human use. In January 1922, fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson, dying of diabetes in a Toronto hospital, received the first injection — the first dose failed, the second, purified one saved him. Children who had been skeletons began to live. The 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting and Macleod; Banting, furious that Best had been excluded, split his prize money with him on the spot. He became Sir Frederick, a national hero, and spent his later years in cancer research and military medicine. In 1941, serving in the RCAF, his plane crashed in Newfoundland; he died of his wounds at forty-nine. He had given humanity fourteen extra years of his own discovery's gift and asked for nothing more than that the work continue. His legacy is complicated by what followed: insulin's discoverers sold the patent to the University of Toronto for one dollar each, hoping it would stay cheap — yet a century later, Americans ration insulin they cannot afford. The Flame of Hope lit by the Queen Mother in 1989 burns in London, Ontario, until a cure is found; Banting would have approved of the condition.

Impact on civilization

Insulin turned type 1 diabetes from a fatal wasting disease — children died within months of diagnosis — into a manageable condition, saving hundreds of millions of lives since 1922. It was the first great triumph of hormone therapy and the proof that biochemistry could conquer disease at its source. Banting's discovery remains the template for translational medicine: from a 2 a.m. scribble to a dying boy's bedside in fourteen months. He proved that a hunch, pursued with rigor, could beat an establishment — and his one-dollar patent remains the moral benchmark against which every drug-pricing scandal is still judged.