Frederick Banting

Frederick Banting was a Canadian physician and medical researcher who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin.

Charles Best: A Canadian medical scientist who worked with Banting on experiments that led to insulin treatment. Best joined Banting’s 1921 research team and helped conduct the dog experiments.
University of Toronto: A public research university in Toronto, Canada, founded in 1827. Its medical school and laboratories hosted the team’s insulin research.
Insulin: A peptide hormone that regulates blood glucose by promoting its uptake and storage. Its discovery and therapeutic use are the central legacy of Banting’s research.
Nobel Prize controversy over insulin: Disagreement over how credit for insulin’s discovery should be divided among the Toronto researchers. Banting objected that Best was excluded from the 1923 Nobel award and shared his prize money with him.
John Macleod: A Scottish-Canadian physiologist who directed the University of Toronto laboratory where insulin research advanced. Macleod provided laboratory resources and guidance, then shared the 1923 Nobel Prize.
Frederick Banting's insulin proposal: Banting’s 1920 proposal to ligate pancreatic ducts and extract an internal secretion affecting diabetes. This idea launched the experiments that became the Toronto insulin project.
Diabetes mellitus: A group of metabolic diseases characterized by persistently elevated blood glucose. Banting’s work transformed the outlook for people with insulin-deficient diabetes.
Nicolae Paulescu: A Romanian physiologist who reported antidiabetic effects from pancreatic extracts before the Toronto group’s clinical success. Paulescu’s earlier findings complicate claims that the Toronto team was first to identify pancreatic antidiabetic activity.
James Collip: A Canadian biochemist who purified pancreatic extracts for clinical use in insulin treatment. Collip made the extract sufficiently usable for the first successful human treatment.
Pancreatic duct ligation: A surgical procedure that ties off ducts carrying pancreatic digestive secretions. Banting proposed it to reduce digestive enzymes before extracting the pancreas’s presumed antidiabetic secretion.

Linked from 4 pages

EndocrinologyRelated: Insulin transformed diabetes from a rapidly fatal disease into a treatable one.