Insulin
Insulina
- Date
- 1921-1922 · confidence high
- Place
- University of Toronto, Canada
- Credited to
- Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip and John Macleod
- People
- 👤 Charles Best1899–1978👤 Frederick Grant Banting1891–1941👤 James Collip1892–1965👤 John MacLeod1913–1984
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
A pancreatic extract that lowered blood sugar in dogs and saved the boy Leonard Thompson in January 1922. It turned type 1 diabetes from a death sentence into a chronic disease.
The 1923 Nobel Prize went to Banting and Macleod; Banting shared his prize with Best and Macleod with Collip. Nicolae Paulescu had published similar results months earlier.
What it led to
- treatment of millions of diabetics
- the biological pharmaceutical industry (Eli Lilly)
- the first protein to be sequenced (Sanger, 1955)
- the first recombinant DNA drug (Humulin, 1982)
Built on
- Paulescu's pancreine (antidiabetic pancreatic extract)1921
- islets of Langerhans
- Minkowski and von Mering's pancreatectomy (1889)
- Paulescu (1921)
Made possible
- Role of the pituitary in sugar metabolism1930
- Total synthesis of crystalline bovine insulin1965
- Recombinant human insulin1978-1982
- recombinant insulin
- insulin pumps