Reception and Controversy

Overnight, Banting went from being an unknown surgeon to a world-famous scientist, receiving many accolades. Because of his efforts, Leonard Thompson would live 13 more years, to age 27, when he died of pneumonia.

Ironically, Banting’s original hypothesis turned out to be wrong. Contrary to what Banting believed, it was not necessary to remove the digestive enzymes from the pancreas in order to isolate insulin. With Collip’s purification method, the researchers were able to extract insulin from whole pancreas, without first performing Banting’s surgery. But if Banting hadn’t pursued his hypothesis, we might not have the lifesaving drug we know today. Why earlier attempts by other researchers failed to isolate insulin remains a mystery. One possibility is that Collip’s use of alcohol and evaporation to extract the chemical somehow made the difference.

Some scientists thought Banting’s fame and status were undeserved because his initial premise was wrong. But these detractors, it was argued by others, misunderstood the nature of the scientific method, which often involves a good deal of luck.

“Nobody can deny that a discovery of first-rate importance has been made, and, if it proves to have resulted from a stumble into the right road, where it crossed the course laid down by a faulty conception, surely the case is not unique in the history of science,” wrote Henry Hallet Dale, a prominent British physiologist, in a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1922.

For their work on developing insulin, Banting and Macleod shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. What about Best and Collip? The Nobel committee deemed their contributions less critical to the discovery, a view that didn’t sit well with the participants. When Banting heard that Best had not been recognized, he was furious and refused at first to accept the award. Eventually, he accepted, but shared half his prize money with Best. Macleod, in turn, shared half his prize money with Collip. The earlier researchers who had determined the role of the pancreas in diabetes and deduced the existence of insulin–even gave it a name–got nothing.

Since Banting and his team made their important discoveries, a number of other scientific milestones have occurred. Insulin was determined to be a protein and, in 1952, the British biochemist Frederick Sanger determined its amino acid sequence–the first such sequence to be described. Today, insulin is no longer obtained from pancreas harvested from animal tissues, but is instead synthesized by genetically engineered bacterial cells modified to contain the human insulin gene (see Chapter 8). Insulin remains one of the most important drugs of modern medicine.