First Insulin Used on Human: Diabetes Treatment Born

Leonard Thompson was fourteen years old and weighed 65 pounds. Diabetes had reduced the Toronto boy to a skeletal figure drifting toward a coma, and his father had carried him to Toronto General Hospital as a last resort. Every doctor who examined the boy agreed on the prognosis: without intervention, he would be dead within weeks. There was no treatment for diabetes in 1922. The standard medical protocol was a starvation diet that merely slowed the dying. Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in a borrowed laboratory at the University of Toronto, had spent the previous summer experimenting with pancreatic extracts on diabetic dogs. Their work built on decades of research connecting the pancreas to blood sugar regulation, but no one had successfully isolated the active substance or tested it on a human. Biochemist James Collip joined the team to purify the extract into something safe enough for injection. The first injection on January 11, 1922, was a partial failure. Thompson's blood sugar dropped slightly, but an abscess formed at the injection site and he developed an allergic reaction. Collip spent the next twelve days frantically improving the purification process. A second round of injections on January 23 produced dramatic results: Thompson's blood sugar normalized, his strength returned, and the symptoms that had been killing him receded. He would live another thirteen years before dying of pneumonia at age twenty-seven. The discovery spread with extraordinary speed. Within a year, the Eli Lilly company had begun mass-producing insulin, and diabetic patients across North America were lining up for treatment. Banting and lab director John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923, just eighteen months after the first human trial. Before insulin, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence measured in months. After it, millions of people gained decades of life they would never have had.