Sir Frederick Grant Banting, KBE, MC, MD, FRSC (November 14, 1891 - February 21, 1941) was a Canadian medical scientist, doctor and Nobel laureate noted as one of the co-discovers of insulin.
Banting was born in Alliston, Ontario, Canada. After studying medicine at the University of Toronto and graduating in 1916, he served in the Canadian Army Medical Corps during World War I. He won the Military Cross during the war for being wounded under fire. After the war, he returned to Canada and between 1919 and 1920 completed his training as an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Dissatisfied with his practice and fascinated by his idea, Banting left London and moved to Toronto. There, on 17 May, 1921 he began his research at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of professor John Macleod. He was assigned a single assistant to help him, the young graduate student Charles Best.
During a summer of intense work, Banting tested his idea, performing operations on diabetic dogs to tie up their pancreatic ducts, which resulted in a partial atrophy of the pancreas. The pancreas would be then removed some weeks later, with the hope that it would then contain a high concentration of uncontaminated secretion of the pancreas.
After some months of work, it appeared to Banting that his method was working, and that he could keep dogs with diabetes alive with his extract. He enthusiastically reported his findings to Macleod, who had been away on his summer holidays during this time. Some people said that Banting's experiments were crude and did not prove the validity of his thinking, which was not physiologically sound in any case. However, the results encouraged further intensive work in the fall, with direct participation by Macleod and the chemist James Collip. The efforts of the team in 1921-1922 culminated in developing the ability to obtain a useful extract, named insulin.
This was hailed as one of the most significant advances in medicine at the time. Insulin was not only discovered, but put into mass production in a matter of months. Hence, almost immediately it began to extend the lives of millions of people worldwide who suffered from the endocrine disease diabetes mellitus that could not be treated and had a very poor prognosis. People who suffered from problems with fat and protein metabolism, leading to blindness and then death only had a short time after the onset of the illness. Leonard Thompson was the first person to be administered.
In 1923 Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Banting shared the award money with Best. The Canadian government gave him a lifetime to work on his research. In 1934 King George V bestowed a knighthood on him, making him Sir Frederick Banting.
