Frederick Banting

Frederick Grant Banting was born on 14 November 1891 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario. After studying medicine in Toronto he served as an army doctor in the First World War, winning the Military Cross. In 1920, while a struggling surgeon in London, Ontario, he conceived an idea for isolating the internal secretion of the pancreas. Professor J. J. R. Macleod gave him laboratory space in Toronto in the summer of 1921, with a student assistant, Charles Best. Their extracts lowered blood sugar in diabetic dogs, and with the help of the biochemist James Collip, who purified the extract, it was first given successfully to a fourteen-year-old boy, Leonard Thompson, in January 1922. In 1923 Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Banting shared his prize money with Best, and Macleod shared his with Collip. The discoverers sold the patent to the University of Toronto for a token sum so that insulin could be widely made. Banting was knighted in 1934. He died in a plane crash in Newfoundland on 21 February 1941.

Faith: Raised in a Methodist family whose parents hoped he would become a minister; his adult beliefs are not well documented. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Alexander Fleming · Claude Bernard