The birth of insulin: a scientific drama | HistoryExtra
"The more I looked into this, the more I began to think that, in places the story of the discovery of insulin starts to resemble Game of Thrones, only enacted in lab coats and pipettes instead of chainmail and poisoned daggers. So the way it goes is this. Fred Banting had, he’d come back from the First World War as a decorated war hero. He'd been, he'd been wounded serving on the Western Front, he’d been decorated for courage under fire, he'd been serving in the medical corps out there. So he came back to Canada with a medal on his chest, but he soon realized that medals on your chest and no guarantee of an easy life on civvy street. And his career began rapidly to go downhill. He had these hopes that he would be able to set himself up with a private medical practice in London, Ontario. It wasn't working out. He was sitting there waiting for the patients to come in. And it wasn't happening, he found himself writing out prescriptions for baby feed and prescriptions for alcohol for people to drink. Couldn't even afford a trip to the cinema, was cooking his meals over a bunsen burner. So as to make ends meet, he started doing a little bit of undergraduate lecturing and one night he was preparing for some lectures, he read a paper on the pancreas.
And, he suddenly thought that he had glimpsed an idea by which he might be able to isolate this hypothetical hormone that the pancreas is making. So took his idea to John Macleod at the University of Toronto, and they didn't really hit it off from the start. Banting recalled that Macleod kind of sat there, listened for a bit and then started leafing through letters on his desk. Now, go remember, we're getting buntings perspective on that. I think that might be a little bit unfair to Macleod because Macleod angle on it was this: other people had tried to find this pancreatic hormone and they'd failed. As far as Macleod’s concerned, he's sitting there, young doctor walks in with this idea to find this hormone but this guy has no experience of the necessary surgical procedures you’re going to need to do this. So Macleod is naturally cautious. He's thinking what is it that makes Banting think he can succeed where these other people have failed. But he did give him the benefit of the doubt. So summer 1921, he gave him some lab space. He set in working with Charles Best who was a final year honours student...
Michael Bliss… showed that a lot of those early experiments were unreliable, they were inconsistent, they were poorly controlled, all of which was pointed out to them by their boss John McLeod when he returned from a fishing trip in Europe, which Banting took badly. But nevertheless, by the end of 1921, MacLeod was confident that it was time for Banting and Best to actually get up and give the first formal presentation of their work to a scientific audience. So they all went off to a big meeting of the great in the good in North American Diabetes Research at University of Yale. Banting got up to present their work. And it was a complete disaster. By his own admission, the prestige of his audience took its toll on his nerves…
McLeod is sitting in the audience and he's desperate. He knows that they need to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. So he took action. He got up and he took over Banting’s presentation. Now, in fairness to McLeod, I think he was doing that to act as a responsible supervisor should. Banting saw things very differently... [Banting] realized he needed to do something that would stamp his name on this discovery that would ensure that it was his name, and not that of McCloud, that will be forever associated with insulin. And he realized that that's something that he needed to do was to show that these pancreatic extracts didn't just work in a diabetic dog, but that they could work in a diabetic human patient... it was not a success. Sure, Leonard's blood sugars came down, but he was still making these poisonous ketones. More importantly than that, he suffered a toxic reaction. He came out in abscesses, and that was due to impurities in the pancreatic extract. And when Banting and Best actually published that work in a scientific paper, they said no clinical benefit was evidenced.
Now, two weeks later, January the 23rd 1922. Leonard was injected again for a second time with some fresh extract. And this time, it was a success. His blood sugars came down, no ketones. Most importantly, of all, no adverse reaction. So the question is what had changed in those two weeks? Well, what had changed was that second batch of extract hadn't actually been made by Banting and Best. It'd been made by a colleague of theirs. James Collip… what Collip had done was, he had used alcohol to clean up the extract and remove those impurities that were causing the toxic reaction. Now to be fair to Banting and Best, they'd realized that impurities would be a problem. They'd also realized you could use alcohol to clean it up, but it was Collip who’d really cracked how to do it…
Now, you might expect Banting to be delighted by this. He wasn't because now not only did he fear that MacLeod was out to steal his thunder. Now, he also began to fear that Collip was out to steal his thunder as well. And in fact, when Collip at one point refused to share the secret of how he'd cleaned up the extract, Banting is said to have actually physically assaulted him, and threatened to hit him. Best always claimed that it was only due to his own intervention, that Collip was spared getting a good kicking from Banting. Things have actually got worse, because in the year that followed, the accolades began to flood in for Banting... Over in Berlin, German clinician Georg Zülzer looked on at this news in utter dismay. And the reason for that was because as far as Zülzer was concerned, he'd already discovered insulin. In 1908, 1908, Zülzer had been making pancreatic extract...
Banting always felt guilty that Charles Best hadn't had a look in with the Nobel Prize, so he made a public announcement that he would share half of his prize money with Best. If he was hoping that that might implicate Best, he was going to be wrong. Because as the years went on, and Banting accumulated more and more accolades, Best looked on with a degree of envy. Banting had a Research Institute named after him and Best also would dearly like a Research Institute named after him, and this began to sour the relationship between the two men. Well, in 1941, Banting had become involved in wartime research. He was a very eminent Canadian scientist by then, and he boarded a plane to fly on a top secret wartime mission to Great Britain and shortly before boarding that plane, he is alleged to have said, This mission is risky. If I don't come back, and they give my professorial chair to that little son of a bitch Best I'll never rest in my grave. Well, his words proved to be tragically prophetic because shortly after takeoff Banting’s plane crashed and he was killed. McLeod had died in 1935. So if the original four members of the Toronto team… there are now only two members left, Collip and Best. And Best was determined which of those two names the world was going to remember for the discovery of insulin. So this story, Michael Bliss has really studied the story of Best, very carefully. And he's shown how Best began to position himself in the story of insulin to make sure that he was seen as the most pivotal figure"
