NANOSNET

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c

Happy Friday!

I was at a meeting recently where the "icebreaker" question was, "What do you consider the biggest achievement in medicine?" My answer was general anesthesia. Today's "birthday boy" might be a close second.

Frederick Banting, a Canadian pharmacologist, orthopedist and field surgeon, was born on this day in 1891. He won the Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of insulin in 2023 with John Macleod, whose lab he worked in with his student, Charles Best. He was only 32 years old at the time of the award, and the youngest Nobel Laureate for Physiology/Medicine.

Banting was raised in a farmhouse in Essa, Ontario in "prosperous circumstances". His four older siblings were not close to him in age, and he felt isolated at home and school, where he was bullied. He was quiet, shy, devoted to farm work, couldn't spell, and resisted discipline at school. He wanted to drop out but his father convinced him to stay. After a teenage growth spurt he became active in football and baseball. Although he did well on his science matriculation exams, he failed English twice, finally passing in 1910.

He failed his first year at Victoria College (of the University of Toronto) but repeated the year and decided to become a doctor. He played rugby and hunkered down at school, with better than average grades. During World War one in his third year of medical school, he joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and trained as an undergraduate house surgeon under orthopedist Clarence Starr. Starr later invited Banting to join him at Granville Hospital, then was deployed to France where he worked on the front lines until he was stuck by shrapnel and removed from duty.

He returned to Canada to finish his surgical and orthopedic training at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Unable to secure a staff position, he opened a practice in London, Ontario and he received his MD in 1922. He also taught part-time at the University of Western Ontario.

At this point, I was wondering how in the world an orthopedist got interested in insulin. His only known exposure to it was in medical school, where Frederick Madison Allen of the Rockefeller Institute gave a lecture recommending that diabetics be placed on starvation died to minimize their metabolism. Onward....

Banting was asked to give a lecture about the pancreas to a class at the University of Western Ontario. While reading the medical literature to prepare for the talk, he found an article by Sharpey-Schafer and colleagues proposing that diabetes resulted from a lack of a protein hormone secreted by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas that they called "insulin". The hormone was thought to regulate sugar metabolism, and a deficiency of it led to increased sugar in the blood stream that was eliminated through the urine. The problem was extracting insulin from the cells of ground up pancreas because they were destroyed by an enzyme (trypsin) in the preparation process.

The next advancement came from Moses Barron in 1920. He published an article about tying off the pancreatic duct (which joins the pancreas to the common bile duct which then drains into the duodenum), which caused the pancreatic tissue to die with the exception of the Langerhans cells. Banting hypothesized that the procedure destroyed the cells secreting the trypsin but did not affect the Langerhans cells. (It was later proven that there was no proteolytic enzyme in pancreatic juice – right experiment, wrong reason.) Macleod provided the lab, and Banting, Best and biochemist James Collip began producing insulin by tying the pancreatic duct of living dogs.

The procedure was successful but produced inadequate quantities of insulin. Banting then used the pancreas of fetal calves obtained from a slaughterhouse. Their insulin proved to be just as potent as the dog insulin, and insulin from pork and beef were the primary sources of insulin until it was genetically engineered in the late 1900s. Many other researchers worldwide were also studying the Langerhans cells and insulin and there is controversy over who really discovered it first; some claim that it was French physiologist Eugène Gley and Rumanian physician Nicolae Constantin Paulsecu.

The first injection of insulin was given to a 14-year-old boy at Toronto General Hospital, albeit unsuccessful; repeated injections were needed to control the boy's diabetes. Banting established a private practice in Toronto to treat patients with diabetes. He and Macleod split the Nobel Prize money – Banting gave half of his award to Best and Macleod gave half of his award to Collip.

As an aside, Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and particularly enjoyed painting landscapes. Sadly, he died after sustaining fatal injuries in a plane crash in 1941.

The discovery of insulin revolutionized medicine. Diabetes was documented since ancient times. The name was introduced by the Greeks, literally meaning "passing through" or siphon. Types 1 and 2 were distinguished as early as 400-500 CE by Indian physicians who named type 2 madhumeha, meaning "honey urine". Thomas Willis introduced the term diabetes mellitus in 1674, referring to it as the "Pissing Evil" and differentiating it from diabetes insipidus. It wasn't until the mid-1700s that Matthew Dobson discovered excess sugar in the urine of people with diabetes.

Pre-insulin treatment consisted of – paradoxically – encouraging diabetic patients to eat extra portions to make up for the calories lost in the urine. Dietary restriction, fasting and sugar limitation entered the therapeutic stage in 1706 although improvement in diabetes was observed during various periods of food shortage prior to that. Insulin in various formulations and administration methods completely changed the landscape of diabetes care, prolonging life and reducing complications. Nonetheless, barriers to care related to access to insulin, cost and availability of both the medication and resources for diabetes control (glucose monitors, needles, syringes, education) in many countries. Three multinational companies make 96% of the world's insulin by volume.

Other notables with birth anniversaries today include impressionist artist Claude Monet, Beeethoven's father (Johann), Mozart's father (Leopold), Robert Fulton (commercial steamboat inventor), Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of India), composer Aaron Copeland and Wynton Marsalis' father Ellis – we saw Wynton and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform on Wednesday night- fantastic music and he is so humble!!

Have an outstanding weekend!

Deb

Father and son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcYv-CfTB_c