A hundred years ago, almost to the day, Dr. Frederick Banting celebrated his 30th birthday in a memorable way.

Accompanied by his colleague Charles Best, on Nov. 14, 1921, Banting presented the results of roughly seven months of diabetes experiments to the Journal Club of the University of Toronto’s Department of Physiology. The pair had discovered an “active pancreatic extract” that would come to be known as “insulin” and, although it hadn’t been tested on humans yet, their experiments with dogs suggested this would be a successful treatment and significantly extend the lives of diabetics.

A few months later, when the discovery was made more public, it was front-page news in the Toronto Star, which ran a story on March 22, 1922, under the banner headline “Toronto Doctors on Track of Diabetes Cure—Diabetes Sufferers Given Message of Hope.” And it wasn’t only because it was hometown boys making good that it landed on the front page.

“Even globally, it was a major deal at the time,” says Christopher Rutty, a professional medical and public historian and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “And one reason we still talk about it today is that, as a friend of mine, Grant Maltman, the curator of Banting House in London, says, ‘Today, we have better insulin, but nothing better than insulin.’

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‘Before insulin, diabetes was a death sentence’: The miracle that two Canadians gave the world 100 years ago is still saving lives (Toronto Star, November 14, 2021)