MedTeck.
Frederick Banting Obituary By Surya Krishnan
^Frederick Grant Banting was born on November 14, 1891 at Alliston, Ontario, Canada. ^ He was the youngest of siblings. He studied in schools around or inside Alliston, Ontario, and went to the University of Toronto for university. He had plans to learn about divinity, but then he moved on to study medicine in university. He graduated from university and got a job with the Canadian Army in the medical sector. He served in France with the army, and acquired the Military Cross for heroism under fire.
When he came back to Canada, he started training as an orthopedic surgeon, and started to study surgery in London, Ontario. He had a large amount of struggles during this time period, mentally and financially. To make some extra money, he had two jobs, one which was being a doctor, another which was lecturing at the University of Western Ontario on surgery and anatomy.
One night when Frederick Banting was reading a medical magazine, he got an idea for a new medicine. *His idea was aimed at isolating the internal secretion of the pancreas, a jelly-like gland behind the stomach. He recalled from his lectures at medical school that this secretion supposedly regulated sugar in the bloodstream. If he could isolate this secretion, it might hold the key in the treatment of diabetes.*
Frederick Banting had one more thing to do. He went to the University of Toronto and had a discussion with J.J.R Macleod, who was the professor of physiology at that time, on his new medicine idea. J.J.R Macleod question Banting’s idea, saying that “If no one else was able to do it, how could he do it?” Even though J.J.R Macleod wasn’t impressed with Banting’s idea, the University gave Frederick Banting a grant to let Banting to proceed with his project, under the condition that he would work under J.J.R Macleod’s discretion. J.J.R Macleod even gave Dr. Banting one of his assistants, Charles Best.
Dr. Banting and Charles Best continued to work on their project of creating the medicine that would cure diabetes in a person. They tested their medicine on diabetic dogs, hoping to find the cure to diabetes. Dr. Banting knew that the main cause of diabetes in a creature was an excessive amount of blood sugar in that creature. Dr. Banting and Charles Best tried their new formula once more, and to their surprise, their formula did in fact decrease the amount of blood sugar in the dog’s body! Dr. Banting called his new formula “insulin” and he declared that his new formula did in fact clear dog’s diabetes.
Later, J.J.R Macleod invited J.B. Collip, a biochemist to join the team. Dr. Banting and the whole team started creating another formula to try and test insulin on a human. After a bit more of research and making of medicine, Dr. Banting and the team went to a nearby hospital to try out their new insulin on a 14 year old boy dying of diabetes. They used a purified ox extract, and injected the extract into the boy. The boy was in fact cured of diabetes in his body.
Dr. Banting was later named Canada’s first professor of medical research because of his discovery. Both he and J.J.R Macleod got the Nobel Prize for their amazing discovery. Dr. Banting was definitely out of his tough financial state he was in earlier. All ended well for Banting after his discovery. Then another World War came, and Dr. Banting was eager to help. He helped out the Canadian Forces once again, but he later died in a plane crash.