July 27th, 1921 – At University of Toronto, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated Insulin for the first time. Up until then, diabetes was a very poorly understood disease with very few treatment options out there. The only thing doctors could do was to keep patients on a low carb diet and even then the best outcome was survival for one extra year.
The breakthrough came with Banting’s and Best’s isolation of insulin from canine test subjects. They were able to induce diabetes in these subjects and reverse the symptoms with insulin treatments. On November 14th, they announced the results of their experiments to the rest of the world. They sold their rights to University of Toronto for $1 and made insulin widely available to pharmaceutical companies without any royalties.
Since then, insulin has been by far the most important and successful treatment option for Type I diabetics. Banting received a Nobel Prize in 1923 for this work, but Best for some reason was left out of it. So Banting immediately shared the prize with his fellow scientist. Perhaps, that is why he was also voted as the 4th Greatest Canadian Ever in 2004.
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