Frederick Banting: From Darkness to Light

Best, Banting and subject

Frederick Banting is a name you probably don't know. 
But in a time and place where we despair of a halt to progress, a reversal of progress, it's good to remember that sometimes, maybe oft times progress occurs without the government helping, progress driven by an individual who was driven to succeed.


When Frederick Banting was doing his work in Toronto Canada, in 1921, it was the roaring 20's in America.  There were famous people in America playing, partying, drinking boot leg liquor.
Most Americans, now and then could name F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babe Ruth, Woodrow Wilson, but who ever heard of Frederick Banting?
School children in America to this day cannot say who Frederick Banting is.
Most of their parents haven't a clue.
But millions owe their lives to him.
Google, God Bless, did run a banner today about him today, the 121st anniversary of his birthday.
Frederick Banting was a trauma surgeon, back from the Great War, with a failing practice in the hinterlands, when he read an article about an experiment in which the pancreatic duct was tied off, destroying the pancreases of dogs and what happened next to the dogs looked a lot like diabetes mellitus.
Banting planted himself in the office of a  Dr. MacLeod at the University of Toronto, one of the leading lights in diabetes research and as a leading light, he believed the core lesion of diabetes was a problem in the liver, which even then was known to produce glucose, blood sugar.
MacLeod gave Banting some lab space at the Univeristy of Toronto, a few dogs, and an assistant, a graduate student named Charles Best. Beyond that, he made no commitments. He did not believe in the pancreas.
Together, while MacLeod went off for summer vacation in Scotland, Banting and Best worked on dogs all summer, sweltering in their un-airconditioned laboratory. It was dirty, discouraging work, but eventually, after many failures, they demonstratie the pancreas did, in fact, produce something which lowered blood sugar, and when it was lost, diabetes ensued.
The story is one of the most thrilling, inspiring, wonderful stories in human history, and little known, because it's, well, it's science and therefore boring.

Same Child, Before and After Insulin

But Banting walked past the children's hospital every day and he saw children dying of diabetes, skeletal wrecks as their parents sat by their beds, helpless.
What Banting and Best discovered was "insulin." 
Progress is not always a straight line;sometimes we slip back, sometimes we take a leap forward, and nothing is ever the same again. 
The back sliding is not what matters.  It's the the steps forward that matter.

Darkness may envelop us, but determined people can light a way forward.
A hopeful note for our present situation.