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He served the sick
Millions of diabetic patients should be thankful to Frederick Banting and Charles Best for their discovery of insulin
DR FREDERICK Grant Banting (1891 to 1941) was one of the most outstanding scientists in history. He discovered the cure for diabetes when millions of people were suffering and dying from it. Even today diabetes is one of the most prevalent diseases. His work on diabetes was good enough to win him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1922.
History tells us that Banting was rather stubborn and he possessed a distinct vision and a decisive mind. During the First World War, while he was serving in the army medical corps, he was wounded. The doctors on duty told him that his wounded arm would be amputated in order to save his life.
The future scientist boldly replied that he would rather risk dying. In 1915 he had left his medical course at the University of Toronto to enlist as a private, but he was ordered to return to his studies and was told that he would be more serviceable to his country with a medical degree. In 1916, he once again joined the medical corps and was happy to serve his country.
Banting returned from the war as quietly as he had left. He joined the Toronto Children’s Hospital as a resident surgeon. However, this did not satisfy him, so he moved to London, Ontario; and began his own practice. Disappointed, he began teaching at the Western Medical School as a part-time lecturer in pharmacology.
One day he was called to prepare a lecture on diabetes, which was listed as one of the fatal diseases since its remedy was yet unknown. Banting secured the literature on the subject and read a number of articles and finally prepared his notes. However, his mind kept on returning to the subject and various queries kept coming to his mind. For example, why some bodies are unable to burn the sugar in their blood and transform it into fuel.
It was, of course, due to a defect in the pancreas, the elongated gland, which secretes the fermentive juices, and which digests the food into bodily energy. Scattered on the healthy pancreas are the dark spots, like little islands. Banting reasoned that these must be there for precise reasons.
The doctors working on diabetes had found definite facts — the island spots of a patient who had died from diabetes were found to have shrivelled to a fraction of their natural size, while those of a patient who died because of other causes retained their original size.
Banting requested his superior, Dr MacLeod, for ten dogs to conduct his experiments, claiming that he may be able to reduce fatalities caused by diabetes. As expected, Prof Macleod was sceptical about the whole thing.
This was the time when great minds of the world were battling to find a cure for the disease. Eventually Banting managed to convince Prof Macleod into giving him permission and assistance in the shape of Charles Herbert Best, a medical student barely out of his teens. Best had shown his aptitude in chemistry and knew how to analyse sugar content in the blood and urine.
Banting decided that he would do all the surgical work on the dogs himself. Enthusiastically, the two young men set to work. Banting had read in a medical journal that if you tie off the pancreas duct, the digestive juice cells dry, shrivel up and die. He decided to dry up the digestive juices of pancreas so that he could isolate and study the mysterious spots, which apparently contained the key to the solution of diabetes. The young scientist theorized that the island cells helped burn the excess of sugar in a healthy body. When this fuel fails, the sugar multiplies and the body becomes diabetic.
Banting and Best started their experiments on dogs by removing their pancreas and estimating the body sugar. A dog whose pancreas they had removed would lie dying of diabetes. However, after a shot of island extract the sugar in his blood began decreasing and a few hours later the dog was on its feet. Banting was jubilant.
It was the extract from the pancreatic islands that burned up the excessive sugar in the dog’s body. Unfortunately, the dog died after twenty days. The reason was that the island extract was given only once, since it was not available in larger quantities.
But Banting was hopeful of his ultimate success. One day as he sat in his laboratory, his thought went back to his father’s farm in Ontario. And he suddenly realized from where he could get insulin in sufficient quantities to prolong the life of diabetics — the cattle. He would extract the necessary juices from unborn calves.
The pancreas of an animal in embryonic stage consists of almost entirely island spots. The slaughtered cattle and the cattle killed in accidents made potential sources of insulin extract.
Banting also experimented on his childhood friend Dr Joe Gilchrist, who was dying of diabetes. He gave his friend an injection of glucose, and then followed it with a shot of isletin. After about two hours Gilchrist was completely normal.
Little by little, Banting was getting the desired results. His patients were getting better. Gilchrist told Banting that about two hours after he was injected with isletin, he was able to breath easily, and his head cleared and appetite returned.
When Prof Macleod heard of Banting’s success he abandoned other work and took charge of the experiments. He changed the name isletin to its latin equivalent insulin. Like wildfire the news spread that a cure of diabetes had at last been found. The report of the experiments was read before the Association of American Physiologists.
But Fred Banting was more worried about his patients than anyone else. Crowds of them thronged into Toronto begging for insulin to save their lives. But there was not enough to go around nor was the method of its injection yet perfected. Banting pleaded for more money to carry on his experiments.
He now did most of his work in the diabetic ward of the Christie Street Hospital for returned soldiers. Here he walked from bed to bed and injected the precious extract into the veins of those who were most helplessly sick.
Gradually, reports from other clinics began to pour into the headquarters. Fifty diabetics in advanced stages had been given insulin, of whom ten had gone into coma. All 10 revived from the coma, whereas 46 patients were reported improved. Six of them had almost completely recovered. In the nick of time the life of such men as King George of England, Hugh Walpole, George Eastman, H.G. Wells and Dr George R. Minot were saved.
The discovery brought various laurels to Banting. The Canadian government built the Banting Research Foundation to carry on his work and granted him fifteen hundred pounds. The citizens of Toronto built an institute (1930) in his name.
King George V gave him the title of a ‘Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ (1934). The Royal Society named him a fellow for his outstanding contribution to the knowledge of medicine. He was killed in a plane crash while on a military medical mission in Newfoundland.
The writer is a former chief scientific officer of the PCSIR Laboratories, Karachi
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