The Internal Secretion of the Pancreas: How Banting and Best Discovered Insulin
How Did Banting and Best First Isolate Insulin from the Pancreas?
Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered that by tying off the pancreatic ducts in dogs, they could allow the enzyme-producing tissue to degenerate while preserving the insulin-producing islets. This breakthrough technique, first published in their landmark 1922 paper “The Internal Secretion of the Pancreas,” enabled them to extract pure insulin without the destructive digestive enzymes that had defeated previous researchers.