Discoveries
Isolation of Insulin
Also Known As Discovery of Insulin
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The isolation of insulin, the hormone whose deficiency causes diabetes, was achieved in 1921 and 1922 by a team at the University of Toronto, transforming what had been a nearly always fatal diagnosis into a manageable chronic condition within a single year.
Facts
Disputed
DiscovererFrederick Banting and Charles Best, University of Toronto, with James Collip and J.J.R. Macleod; credit is genuinely contested. 2 Credited principally to Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best, who first isolated a pancreatic extract that lowered blood sugar in diabetic dogs in the summer of 1921; biochemist James Collip then purified the extract to make it safe for human use, and physiology professor J.J.R. Macleod supplied the laboratory the work was carried out in and oversaw it. The 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Banting and Macleod alone, a decision Banting protested publicly by sharing his prize money with Best, prompting Macleod to share his in turn with Collip; who most deserves credit for the isolation remains a genuine, sourced dispute rather than a settled attribution. Discovery Year Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Karolinska awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the isolation of insulin.
Discovered By
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Discoverer
Frederick Banting publicly objected to the Nobel committee's choice of James Macleod, the laboratory's supervising professor, as his co laureate instead of Charles Best, his actual research partner in the 1921 experiments, and shared his own prize money with Best in protest. Macleod similarly shared his award with James Collip, the biochemist whose purification work made a safe clinical insulin extract possible, in recognition that the Nobel Prize's two recipient limit did not reflect the true four person collaboration.
A dissenting reading, from Frederick BantingEncyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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