A Canadian physician who was able to extract insulin from the pancreas, and who worked with Charles Best.
Born: November 14th, 1891 | Died: February 21st, 1941.
Sir Frederick Banting was able to extract the insulin hormone successfully from a pancreas, in order to help the ability to synthesise insulin for people with the condition diabetes.
Born on November 14th, 1891, Frederick Grant Banting was born to William Thompson Banting and Margaret Grant, and was the youngest of five children. He was educated at the public and high schools at Alliston, and later went to University in Toronto, where he studied medicine, after trying out divinity.
In 1916, he took his M.B. degree and at once joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps. He served during World War I, in France, became injured during 1918 at the Battle of Cambrai, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1919 for heroism under fire. Postwar, Banting returned to medicine, and studied orthopaedics at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Just before all this, along with being a lecturer at the University of Toronto, he became interested in Diabetes.
During 1889, scientists Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski found that completely removing the pancreas from dogs resulted in almost instant diabetes. They figured that the pancreas was creating something that they named 'insulin', a hormone. Among many attempts to remove the insulin from the dogs' pancreas resulted in failure because the enzymes destroyed it as soon as the pancreas was ground up.
Banting and Charles Best, who was a laboratory assistant to Banting, began an intense program in order to isolate the hormone and remove it from the pancreas of a dog. They tied up the pancreatic ducts of dogs, conserving a set of cells now known as the Islets of Langerhorns, and were able to inject the dogs with some of the solution within these cells, which seemed to cure their immediate onset diabetes.
Both Banting and Best were able to isolate the insulin which was able to be collected up and treated to humans who had diabetes. They saved millions of people from suffering from the condition. They completed their work in 1922, and in 1923, the Nobel Peace Price was given to Banting and J.J.R. Macleod, who allowed Banting and Best to experiment in his laboratories. Angered from Best not being given the prize, Banting decided to share his portion of the prize with Best, and Macleod also shared his portion with James B. Collip, who also worked on the purification of insulin with them.
With his discoveries and experiments, Banting became head of the University of Toronto's Banting and Best Department of Medical Research in 1923.
Banting was also presented with a knighthood for the British Empire in 1934.
Personally, Banting married Marion Robertson in 1924, and they had one child, William, born in 1928. The marriage ended in divorce in 1932, and in 1937, Banting married Henrietta Ball.
Unfortunately, Banting died at the age of 49, during World War Two, after being involved in a plane crash in Newfoundland.
