In 1922, a team of scientists visited Toronto General Hospital, where wards housed numerous diabetic children.
Many of these children were in a comatose state and on the brink of death due to diabetic ketoacidosis.
As a result of the amount of deaths, scientists moved swiftly and proceeded to inject the children with a new purified extract of insulin.
As they commenced injecting the final comatose child, the first one to receive the injection started to regain consciousness.
Subsequently, one by one, all the children emerged from their diabetic comas.
During the early 1920s, Frederick Banting, Charles Best and John Macleod discovered insulin.
Both Banting and Macleod were awarded Nobel Prizes in 1923.
James Collip played a crucial role in refining insulin, which was instrumental in enabling its effective application in diabetes treatment.
Banting declined to have his name included on the patent and opted to sell it to the University of Toronto for a mere $1.
He believed it unethical to seek profit from a discovery destined to save countless lives.
“Insulin belongs to the world, not to me,” he said.
In 2019, the average cost was $58 per insulin fill, typically for a 30-day supply.
Further details of the invention
Frederick Banting, a young surgeon with a bachelor’s degree in medicine, had no background in research when he first proposed the idea of insulin. He was initially met with skepticism, but his determination led him to John Macleod, a leading figure in carbohydrate metabolism research.
Macleod provided Banting with a laboratory space, ten dogs for experimentation, and the assistance of a fourth-year medical student, Charles Best. This unlikely team, later joined by biochemist James Collip, worked tirelessly through the summer of 1921, leading to the monumental discovery of insulin.
While Banting and Best are often credited with the discovery of insulin, the contributions of James Collip are sometimes overlooked.
Collip joined the team later in the process and was tasked with refining the pancreatic extract that Banting and Best had developed. His work was crucial in preparing insulin in a form that was safe and effective for human use.
Collip’s refined insulin was used in the successful treatment of 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, the first person to receive insulin therapy.
The discovery of insulin has had a profound impact on the lives of people with diabetes, but the journey from discovery to accessibility has been fraught with challenges.
Despite the original intent of Banting and his team for insulin to be freely available, the price of insulin has been a contentious issue since its discovery. Over the past decade, the cost of insulin has tripled, and the out-of-pocket prescription costs patients now face have doubled.
This has led to a crisis where as many as one in four people with diabetes are now skimping on or skipping lifesaving doses.
This is Charles Best and Frederick Banting. They were Canadian scientists that won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin in 1923.
Banting was 32 when he received the Nobel Prize and he chose to share half the prize money with Best who was his assistant and just 24 years old at the time.
Banting refused to put his name on the patent and instead sold it to the University of Toronto for $1. He thought it was unethical to profit from a discovery that would save millions of lives. “Insulin belongs to the world, not to me,” he said.
Unfortunately, the drug today has been subjected to price gouging by pharmaceutical companies with the average price per month rising to $450 in 2016.
Culled: morbidful, visionaryvoid & timecaptales