Dr. Marco V. Benavides Sánchez. Medmultilingua.com .

In the winter of 1922, the pediatric diabetes ward at Toronto General Hospital bore witness to a quiet desperation. Decades before modern advances would grant humanity mastery over blood glucose, children afflicted with type 1 diabetes faced an almost inevitable fate: diabetic coma followed by death. Starvation diets—desperate attempts to prolong life by drastically limiting carbohydrate intake—purchased mere days or weeks at an unbearable cost.

It was against this backdrop of suffering that a small cadre of researchers rewrote the annals of medicine. Frederick Banting and Charles Best, laboring in a makeshift laboratory at the University of Toronto, succeeded in extracting a pancreatic substance that appeared to harbor the elusive hormone responsible for glucose metabolism. With the expertise of biochemist James Collip, the team managed to purify the compound sufficiently to attempt, for the first time in history, treatment in human patients.

On January 11, 1922, Leonard Thompson—a fourteen-year-old boy teetering on the precipice of diabetic coma—received the first injection of insulin. The initial response proved modest, but following additional purification of the extract, a second dose yielded an extraordinary transformation. Leonard awakened, opened his eyes, and began his return to life. In the days that followed, the team moved through the pediatric ward, administering insulin to dozens of dying children. Witnesses from that era recount how, as they injected the last patient, the first recipients were already sitting up, asking for water, calling for their mothers: life flowing back before their very eyes, as if summoned from the void.

One of history’s most remarkable acts of scientific altruism unfolded that same year: Banting, Best, and Collip chose to surrender the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for one dollar each. They rejected any financial gain, convinced that this discovery must belong to all humanity. Their gesture established an ethical precedent rarely matched in the history of medicine—a reminder that science, at its noblest, serves not profit but the sanctity of human life.

Historical Milestones

The path to insulin’s discovery was paved by decades of meticulous observation:

– In 1869, German medical student Paul Langerhans first described the clusters of pancreatic cells that would eventually bear his name: the islets of Langerhans, though their function remained a mystery for decades.[1]

– By 1910, Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer proposed the name “insulin” (from the Latin *insula*, meaning island) for the suspected hormone secreted by these pancreatic islets.[2]

– In 1923, Banting and John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin; Best and Collip, though formally excluded from the award, were universally acknowledged as essential collaborators in this triumph.[3]

– Industrial production commenced in 1923 through partnership with Eli Lilly and Company, transforming insulin into one of the first large-scale biotechnological therapies and making it accessible to diabetic patients worldwide.[4]

References

[1] Langerhans P. Contributions to the microscopic anatomy of the pancreas. Berlin: Gustav Lange; 1869. (Translated and republished in: *Bull Inst Hist Med* 1937;5:259-297)

[2] Sharpey-Schafer EA. The endocrine organs: an introduction to the study of internal secretion. London: Longmans, Green and Co.; 1916.

[3] Bliss M. *The Discovery of Insulin*. 25th Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2007.

[4] Quianzon CC, Cheikh I. History of insulin. *J Community Hosp Intern Med Perspect*. 2012;2(2):18701. doi:10.3402/jchimp.v2i2.18701

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