27/05/2026
Before the discovery of insulin extraction in 1921 a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes for children was a death sentence. The determination and will of one man, Frederick Banting changed this forever. Together with his team, thousands have since been able to live a full life with the support of injected insulin.
This is a great, inspiring read about one person, who more than 100 years later, continues to make a difference to families 🫶
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Before 1921, a diabetes diagnosis in a child wasn't a health problem. It was a countdown.
No treatment existed. No cure was coming. Doctors, unable to offer anything better, prescribed starvation diets — limiting food to days, sometimes weeks — just to buy a little more time before the inevitable. Parents would sit beside hospital beds watching their children grow thinner, weaker, quieter. The medical establishment had tried and failed for decades. The world's most celebrated scientists had run out of ideas.
Most people accepted it as a tragedy that simply had no solution.
Frederick Banting could not.
He wasn't supposed to be the one who changed this. He grew up on a farm in rural Ontario, the son of working people with no wealth or connections. He scraped his way through medical school on sheer will — not brilliance, not privilege. He served as a battlefield surgeon in World War I, was wounded in France in 1918, and came home to build a quiet, ordinary life.
But the image of those children wouldn't leave him.
In October 1920, while preparing a lecture on the pancreas, he came across a medical journal article that stopped him cold. That night, unable to sleep, he scribbled an idea in his notebook — a theory about extracting something from the pancreas that might regulate blood sugar. It was rough. Unproven. The kind of idea that experienced researchers had dismissed or never bothered to pursue.
He brought it to J.J.R. Macleod, one of the most respected professors at the University of Toronto. Macleod was polite but doubtful. This was a small-town doctor with no research background, proposing to solve a problem that had defeated far more qualified minds. But something made him give Banting a chance — a cramped lab, ten dogs, and a graduate assistant named Charles Best.
That summer of 1921 was brutal.
The lab was sweltering. Funding was thin. Equipment was outdated. Dog after dog died. Extracts failed. The work was exhausting, demoralizing, and seemed to be leading nowhere. Best and Banting worked through the failures together, adjusting, refining, trying again.
Then, on July 30, 1921, they injected a diabetic dog named Marjorie with their pancreatic extract.
Her blood sugar dropped.
She became alert. She moved. She lived.
For the first time in recorded history, someone had reversed the effects of diabetes in a living creature. Banting and Best stared at what they had done, knowing that somewhere across the city — across the country, across the world — children were dying of the very thing they had just reversed in a dog.
They worked faster.
Biochemist James Collip joined the team to help purify the extract. Macleod provided more resources. The race was no longer just scientific — it was moral. Every week they spent refining their formula was another week that families buried children they might have saved.
By January 1922, they were ready to try on a human being.
Leonard Thompson was fourteen years old and dying in Toronto General Hospital. He weighed sixty-five pounds. He was barely conscious. His father, given no other options, signed the consent form knowing his son might have days left.
On January 11, 1922, they injected Leonard with the first dose of insulin.
The initial batch wasn't pure enough. Leonard had a reaction and showed little improvement. The team went back to the lab and worked around the clock. Twelve days later, they tried again with a refined formula.
On January 23, Leonard Thompson's blood sugar fell to normal levels for the first time in his life. He sat up. He spoke. He ate. He grew stronger by the day.
A boy who had been given days to live walked out of that hospital.
Word tore through the medical world. Hospitals were flooded with desperate requests. Parents who had been quietly preparing for funerals were suddenly on the phone begging for doses. The team scrambled to produce as much insulin as possible, but demand was overwhelming. Children were still dying while waiting.
One of them was Elizabeth Hughes, the eleven-year-old daughter of the U.S. Secretary of State. To survive, she had been kept on fewer than 400 calories a day — a starvation diet that left her at 45 pounds, skeletal and fragile. In August 1922, she began insulin treatment under Banting's care.
She lived to be 73 years old.
A life that would have ended in childhood stretched across seven decades — a career, a family, a full and ordinary life — because of what was discovered in a cramped Toronto lab by a man who refused to give up.
By 1923, insulin was being produced at scale. Thousands of patients who had received death sentences were alive. That same year, Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Banting, at 32, became the youngest recipient in that category in history.
He was furious.
Not at winning — but at who was left out. The Nobel Committee had ignored Charles Best and James Collip entirely. Banting announced publicly that Best had earned equal credit. Then he split his prize money with him on the spot. Macleod did the same with Collip.
He could have kept the full recognition. He chose not to.
And when pharmaceutical companies came calling — ready to make him wealthy beyond measure for the patent rights to insulin — Banting, Best, and Collip sold the patent to the University of Toronto for one dollar.
One dollar.
When asked why, Banting said something simple: this belongs to the world. He would not profit from the suffering of sick children. He would not put a price on a discovery that people needed to live.
He continued working — cancer, aviation medicine, protective gear for pilots in World War II. When war broke out again, he enlisted at nearly 50 years old. On February 21, 1941, his plane went down over Newfoundland on a military research mission. He survived the crash but died from his injuries in the wreckage.
He was 49 years old.
Today, more than 590 million people worldwide live with diabetes. Before 1921, every child among them would have died.
Because one man — not the most decorated, not the most celebrated, not the most connected — looked at a problem the world had accepted as unsolvable and decided that wasn't good enough.
Frederick Banting didn't save those children because he was the most gifted person in the room.
He saved them because he was the one who couldn't walk away.
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