Curing Disease: Insulin, Smallpox, and Polio

Before 1921, a diagnosis of severe type 1 diabetes was effectively a death sentence, since the body's inability to produce insulin left patients unable to regulate their blood sugar. At the University of Toronto, the surgeon Frederick Banting, working with medical student Charles Best in the laboratory of the physiologist John James Rickard Macleod, succeeded in extracting a pancreatic hormone capable of lowering blood sugar in diabetic dogs during the summer of 1921. The biochemist James Collip then developed a method to purify the extract sufficiently for safe use in humans. On 11 January 1922, a fourteen-year-old patient named Leonard Thompson became the first person successfully treated with insulin at Toronto General Hospital, and his dramatic recovery marked one of the most significant therapeutic breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923, a decision that provoked controversy since it excluded Best and Collip; Banting, angered by the omission, publicly shared his prize money with Best, while Macleod shared his with Collip.