Medical Definition of Frederick Banting
1.
Banting received his medical degree from Toronto and served in the Canadian armed services during the First World War.
He practiced orthopaedic surgery following the war, but was not too successful because of his disinterest. He asked the Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto if he could work on a problem he was interested in, and when he explained his idea relative to the pancreas, the professor poopooed his experiment.
Regardless, he was given a dirty little lab in which to work. Banting was 30, and he was assisted by a 23-year-old second-year medical student, Charles H. Best. After eight months, in 1922, these two isolated insulin and published their discovery, which revolutionised the treatment for diabetes mellitus.
In 1923, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was given to Banting and the physiology professor who loaned him the dirty lab to work in, J.J.R. Macleod. In 1924, Banting was knighted.
Unfortunately, he was killed in an airplane accident in 1944.
Lived: 1891-1944.
(15 Nov 1997)
Lexicographical Neighbors of Frederick Banting
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