You may ask who Frederick Banting was. Well, I"m going to tell you all about him. Frederick Banting was a Canadian surgeon who was born on a farm near Alliston, Ontario on November 14, 1891. He was the youngest of five children of William Thompson Banting and Margaret Grant.
He graduated from the University of Toronto. During 1914 through 1918, Banting served as a physician in the Canadian Army. Even though he was wounded in the hand, Banting still attained the Military Cross for his bravery. He then became an instructor of physiology at the University of Western Ontario.
Banting was given laboratory space at the University of Toronto in 1921 to research diabetes (a disease he had become deeply interested in). At the University of Toronto, Banting worked with John James Rikard Macleod, Charles Herbert Best, and James Bertram Collip to create something which would help control diabetes.
The work of Naunyn, Minkowski, Opie, Schafer, and some others helped him understand that diabetes was caused because of a lack of protein hormone secreted by the islands of Langerhans of the pancreas. Schafer had given this hormone the name insulin, and supposed that insulin controlled the metabolism of sugar, so that lack of it results in the accumulation of sugar in the blood and the excretion of the excess of sugar in the urine.
His attempt to feed patients fresh pancreas, or extracts of it, to supply the missing insulin had failed, presumably because the proteolytic enzyme of the pancreas had destroyed the protein insulin in these. .
After many more tries with it, Banting and Charles Best started work which lead to the discovery of insulin. Insulin affected many people and was a great discovery. It is now used to treat diabetes well in many places. We should all pay respects to the discoverer of insulin, Sir Frederick Grant Banting, who died in a plane crash in Newfoundland sometime in February 1941.
