Before 1921, type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Doctors prescribed starvation to buy time - children surviving on scraps, their breath turning sweet and sharp as their blood became poison. Parents watched, powerless, as their children faded away.
That world changed because of one sleepless night.
Frederick Banting, a young Canadian surgeon barely scraping by, was preparing a lecture on the pancreas when he read about an experiment: if the pancreatic ducts were tied off, the digestive tissue died, but the insulin-producing cells survived. That single detail stayed with him. Haunted by the memory of a diabetic boy he couldn’t save, Banting had an idea that would rewrite medicine.
He scribbled a note by candlelight: “Diabetes. Ligate pancreatic ducts of dogs. Keep dogs alive. Try to isolate internal secretion.”
It was a fourteen-word spark that saved millions.
With no money and only borrowed lab space, Banting persuaded the University of Toronto to lend him a tiny attic, a few dogs, and a student assistant named Charles Best. Through stifling summer heat, they worked side by side, sleeping beside their makeshift lab and its barking test subjects. When they injected their crude extract into a diabetic dog named Marjorie, her blood sugar plunged. She lived for seventy days.
A biochemist, James Collip, soon joined and refined their extract into a safe, pure form. On January 11, 1922, a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson lay dying from diabetes. He received the first human dose of insulin. Within hours, his blood sugar fell from 520 to 120. Within days, he was eating again. Newspapers called it the “Toronto Miracle.”
Banting could have become wealthy overnight. Instead, he sold the patent for one dollar, saying, “Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.”
Today, that gift has saved more than 400 million lives. And yet, in the United States, insulin prices have climbed so high that many are rationing again, the same tragedy Banting sought to end.
His story is both a triumph and a challenge: a reminder that the greatest discoveries are born from empathy, not profit.
Listen to the full story on the Dr. Kumar Discovery Podcast - how a sleepless night, a scrap of paper, and an act of generosity changed history.
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