insulin

Insulin comes from Latin insula (island). The name refers to the Islets of Langerhans — clusters of cells within the pancreas that produce the hormone. Paul Langerhans, a 22-year-old medical student in Berlin, described these islets in his doctoral dissertation in 1869. He had no idea what they did. The connection between the islets and diabetes was made by Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering in 1889, when they discovered that removing a dog's pancreas caused diabetes. The island cells were producing something essential.

The race to extract that something took three decades. Frederick Banting, a Canadian surgeon, and Charles Best, a medical student, extracted a pancreatic substance from dogs at the University of Toronto in 1921. Biochemist James Collip purified it enough for human use. In January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy dying of diabetes at Toronto General Hospital, received the first injection. His blood sugar dropped. He lived.

Banting and his supervisor J.J.R. Macleod won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923 — one of the fastest Nobel awards ever given. Banting was furious that Best was excluded and split his prize money with him. Macleod split his with Collip. Banting sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for $1, saying 'insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.' The university licensed it to manufacturers at low cost.

Insulin is now produced by genetically engineered bacteria and yeast — human insulin genes inserted into microorganisms that produce the protein in fermentation tanks. The drug that was named after tiny islands in the pancreas saves approximately 200 million lives worldwide. Banting's $1 patent did not prevent insulin from becoming expensive in the United States, where the average price per vial is over $300. The word means island. The drug means survival.