Frederick Banting

Frederick Grant Banting was born on November 14, 1891, on a farm near Alliston, Ontario, the youngest of five children of William Thompson Banting and Margaret Grant ^[1]. The family were Methodists of modest means, and Frederick grew up doing farm chores, an upbringing that later colleagues credited for his physical stamina and practical, hands-on approach to problems. He attended local schools in Alliston, where he was an unremarkable student, better remembered for determination than brilliance ^[2].

His parents hoped he would enter the ministry, and in 1910 he enrolled in the general arts course at Victoria College, University of Toronto, with that path in mind. He failed his first year and had to make a choice about his future. Medicine won out over the church. In 1912 he was admitted to the university's medical school, where his grades were solid but never spectacular ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Frederick Banting before insulin would have found little to predict fame. The First World War compressed his education: his class was fast-tracked, and he received his medical degree in December 1916, reporting for military duty with the Canadian Army Medical Corps the following day ^[3].

Banting served as a medical officer on the Western Front. In September 1918, at the Battle of Cambrai, he was wounded in the right arm by shrapnel yet continued treating injured soldiers for hours before accepting care himself. For this he was awarded the Military Cross in 1919 ^[3]. Surgeons considered amputating his damaged arm; he refused, and the arm eventually healed.

After the war he completed surgical training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, then moved to London, Ontario, in 1920 to open a private practice. Patients were scarce. In his first month he reportedly earned only a few dollars, and he took a part-time position demonstrating anatomy and physiology at the University of Western Ontario to pay his bills ^[2].

The turning point came on the night of October 31, 1920. Preparing a lecture on the pancreas, Banting read a journal article by Moses Barron describing a case in which a blocked pancreatic duct had caused the digestive tissue of the gland to wither while the islets of Langerhans survived. Banting scribbled a now famous note to himself proposing to ligate the pancreatic ducts of dogs, wait for the digestive cells to degenerate, and then extract the internal secretion of the surviving islets ^[1]. Researchers had long suspected that such a secretion regulated blood sugar, but every attempt to isolate it had failed, apparently because digestive enzymes destroyed it during extraction.

Banting took his idea to John James Rickard Macleod, professor of physiology at the University of Toronto and an authority on carbohydrate metabolism. Macleod was skeptical of the inexperienced surgeon but agreed in 1921 to provide laboratory space, experimental dogs, and a student assistant. A coin toss between two candidates gave Banting the help of Charles Best, a 22-year-old physiology graduate ^[4].

Banting and Best began work in May 1921 in a hot, poorly equipped laboratory. Through the summer they operated on dogs, tied off pancreatic ducts, and prepared extracts from the degenerated glands. By late July their extract, which they first called isletin, was lowering blood sugar in dogs whose pancreases had been removed. One depancreatized dog, Marjorie, was kept alive for weeks on injections ^[4]. Macleod, returning from Scotland, pressed for more rigorous controls, and in December 1921 the biochemist James Collip joined the team to purify the extract for human use.

On January 11, 1922, a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson, dying of diabetes at Toronto General Hospital, received the first injection. The initial preparation was impure and caused an abscess, but a refined extract prepared by Collip was administered on January 23 and produced a dramatic fall in the boy's blood sugar. Thompson recovered his strength and lived another 13 years ^[5]. Among the most cited Frederick Banting facts is what followed: the team sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for one dollar each, insisting that no one should profit from a discovery meant to save lives ^[6]. Within two years, insulin produced in partnership with Eli Lilly and Company and Connaught Laboratories was reaching diabetic patients across North America and Europe.

In October 1923 the Nobel committee awarded the Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Banting and Macleod. Banting was furious. He believed Best, who had shared the bench work, deserved the recognition rather than Macleod, whom he regarded as an administrator who had been absent for much of the crucial summer. He announced that he would split his prize money equally with Best, and Macleod responded by sharing his portion with Collip ^[1].

The episode exposed rivalries that had simmered throughout the research. Banting and Collip had nearly come to blows in the laboratory over control of the purification method, and Banting resented what he saw as Macleod's appropriation of credit in lectures and publications. Historians, most thoroughly Michael Bliss in his 1982 study The Discovery of Insulin, have concluded that the achievement was genuinely collaborative: Banting supplied the driving idea and surgical persistence, Best the assistance, Collip the decisive purification, and Macleod the scientific direction and resources ^[4].

Whatever the disputes, the honors that followed were extraordinary for any account of Frederick Banting achievements. He was the first Canadian to receive a Nobel Prize, and at 32 he remains the youngest laureate in Physiology or Medicine ^[7]. The Canadian Parliament granted him a lifetime annuity of $7,500 in 1923, and in 1934 King George V made him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire ^[2].

Banting married Marion Robertson in 1924, and their son William was born in 1929. The marriage was unhappy and ended in a divorce in 1932 that Toronto newspapers covered with an enthusiasm Banting found humiliating ^[2]. In 1939 he married Henrietta Ball, a technician in his laboratory, who later became a physician and public health advocate in her own right.

Away from medicine, Banting was a serious amateur painter. He befriended A. Y. Jackson of the Group of Seven and joined him on sketching trips, including a 1927 journey to the Canadian Arctic aboard a government supply ship, where both men painted the coastal landscape ^[8]. Banting sometimes signed early works with a pseudonym to see whether they would be judged on merit rather than his fame. His canvases of rural Quebec and the north are now held in Canadian collections and appear periodically at auction.

Colleagues described him as blunt, restless, and uncomfortable with celebrity. He disliked public speaking, distrusted flattery, and preferred the company of artists and old army friends to formal scientific society ^[2].

The University of Toronto created the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research in 1923 and named Banting its director. His later scientific projects ranged widely, taking in silicosis, cancer, and the physiology of drowning, though none approached the significance of the insulin work ^[1]. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1935.

As war approached in the late 1930s, Banting turned to military medical problems. He chaired committees on aviation medicine for Canada's National Research Council and supported the work that produced early anti-gravity flight suits designed by his colleague Wilbur Franks, research aimed at keeping fighter pilots conscious during high-speed turns ^[3]. He also participated in Allied discussions of biological warfare research, a subject he approached as a matter of grim wartime necessity.

On February 20, 1941, Banting boarded a Lockheed Hudson bomber in Gander, Newfoundland, bound for England on a liaison mission concerning wartime medical research. Shortly after takeoff both engines failed, and the aircraft crashed near Musgrave Harbour on Newfoundland's northeast coast. The pilot survived; Banting, badly injured, died the next day, February 21, 1941, at the age of 49 ^[9]. He was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto after a funeral that drew thousands.

Insulin remains one of medicine's clearest before-and-after stories. Prior to 1922, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes in childhood meant death within months or a few years on starvation diets. Afterward, patients could expect to live full lives, and the therapy has since sustained hundreds of millions of people worldwide ^[5]. The discovery also demonstrated what a focused university research program could accomplish, and the royalties the University of Toronto collected from insulin manufacturing funded Canadian medical science for decades ^[6].

Banting's name is fixed across Canadian public life. World Diabetes Day is observed each November 14, his birthday, a date chosen by the International Diabetes Federation and endorsed by the United Nations ^[7]. Banting House in London, Ontario, where he conceived the idea in 1920, is a National Historic Site that diabetes patients from around the world visit, many leaving messages at its Flame of Hope, a torch that will be extinguished only when a cure for diabetes is found ^[10]. His childhood hometown of Alliston maintains the Banting Homestead as a heritage park, and schools, streets, and research institutes across Canada carry his name.

Any balanced Frederick Banting biography must weigh an irony historians often note: he was not a gifted scientist by training, his original hypothesis about duct ligation proved unnecessary to the final method, and the purified hormone owed much to Collip and Macleod. Yet without his obstinate refusal to abandon the idea, the Toronto discovery would not have happened when and where it did. Michael Bliss called him a flawed hero, and the description has endured: an ordinary man who forced an extraordinary result ^[4].