Frederick Banting
Sir Frederick Grant Banting (born November 14, 1891 in Alliston / Ontario , Canada ; † February 21, 1941 at Musgrave Harbor in Newfoundland ) was a Canadian surgeon and physiologist.
Experiments inspired by Banting to study diabetes by him, John James Rickard Macleod , Charles Best and James Collip led to the isolation of insulin in 1921 .
Frederick Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923 for the discovery of insulin. To this day, at 32 years of age, he is the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He was the first Canadian ever to win a Nobel Prize . In 1994 he was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame .
family
Banting, a farmer's son from the Canadian province, was born the youngest of five children to William Thompson Banting and his wife Margaret Grant. In 1924, Banting married Marion Robertson. The marriage ended in divorce in 1932, which led to a media scandal. In 1937 he married Henrietta Ball.
On February 20, 1941, problems occurred with the Canadian Hudson bomber with the registration T9449 over the North Atlantic . On board were the pilot, a navigator, a radio operator and Banting as the liaison officer. The engines failed and an emergency landing succeeded. The pilot survived, the navigator and radio operator were killed. Banting was seriously injured in the upper body and died the following day.
education and profession
After his schooling in Alliston he started at the University of Toronto , a study theology , but soon the compartment and closed in 1916 his degree in medicine from. Immediately afterwards he joined the Canadian army and served as a medical officer in England and on the French front during the First World War . In 1918 he was injured in the war in Cambrai .
After the war, Frederick Banting returned to Canada in 1919 and practiced as a doctor in London, Ontario . He specialized as a pediatrician , worked as a demonstrator in surgery and anatomy at the University of Ontario in Toronto. In 1922 he worked as a lecturer in pharmacology at the University of Toronto and graduated as a Medical Doctor (MD). In 1923, Banting and Best took over the chair of medical research and Banting worked as a consular doctor in Toronto. In 1932 Banting was elected a member of the Leopoldina . When Canada entered the war in 1939, he volunteered for military service for the second time.
power
Banting took an early interest in the disease diabetes mellitus . He took up the research of Bernhard Naunyn , Oskar Minkowski , Eugene Lindsay Opie , Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer and other scientists who suggested that diabetes is caused by a deficiency in a hormonal protein produced in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas . Naunyn and others believed that insulin was responsible for regulating the sugar balance. Initial attempts to replace the insulin that is missing in diabetic patients by consuming animal pancreas failed, however, because insulin is destroyed by proteolytic enzymes in the pancreas.
Banting came up with the idea through an article by Moses Baron that the destruction of insulin could be caused by trypsin . By destroying the trypsin-producing cells, Banting and his assistant, the physiology student Charles Herbert Best (1899–1978), succeeded in isolating insulin for the first time.
In 1923, Banting and John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of insulin. The decision provoked protests, as Macleod is said to have only made his laboratory available. Banting was the first Canadian to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Best, who played a key role in isolating insulin, was not included in the award. On June 4, 1934, Banting was defeated by the British King George V to Knight Commander of the British Empire .
During the 1930s, Banting was involved in projects related to biological warfare and aviation medicine.
The moon crater Banting and the asteroid (43293) Banting are named after him.
Discovery of insulin
Fascinated by the idea of discovering the hormone that is released into the blood by the islet cells of Langerhans in the pancreas and regulates sugar metabolism, Fred Banting spoke to the physiologist at the University of Toronto, John Macleod . The ominous hormone had been an unsolved research puzzle for decades.
Macleod quickly realized that there was an enthusiast who had nothing to show but basic surgical knowledge. He found Banting's suggestions at least interesting and provided him with a laboratory, ten test dogs and the 21-year-old student Charles H. Best as assistants.
On May 17, 1921, the new researchers began to work and in June Macleod went on a summer vacation to Scotland. It turned out that Banting had overestimated his surgical skills: most of the test dogs died of infections, Banting's vascular ligating technique was unreliable, and it wasn't until July 27 that a dog's pancreas could be removed. The gland was minced, made into an extract, and injected intravenously into a test dog without a pancreas. In fact, the test animal's blood sugar level fell. With the pancreatic extract from five other dogs, it was possible to keep a dog without a pancreas alive for five days. Since the supply was exhausted, Banting came up with the idea of making an extract from pancreas from calf embryos from the slaughterhouse. With this extract, a sick test dog remained alive for 70 days.
When Macleod returned to Toronto on September 21, he realized the scope of the experiments, commissioned the chemist James Collip to prepare a purified extract, and in January 1922 a seriously ill diabetic was treated with it for the first time: the patient's condition improved considerably. The then five-year-old Theodore Ryder , who was treated by Banting from July of the same year and was therefore one of the first patients, died in 1993 at the age of 76 and, at 70 years of diabetes, achieved what is probably the longest documented case of ongoing insulin treatment in of medical history. On May 3, 1922, the research results from Canada were presented in Washington, the agent for the treatment of diabetes had been discovered: insulin.
This was followed by arguments about the question of the individual parts of the common discovery. All participants except Banting were scientifically trained and integrated into Toronto's medical hierarchy. Banting had given up on animal testing day and night and believed that his priority was being challenged. He developed suspicion, then a lifelong dislike of Macleod.
Publications (selection)
- The Internal Secretion of the Pancreas, Pancreatic Extracts, Pancreatic Extracts in the Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, The Effect of Pancreatic Extract (Insulin) on Normal Rabbits, The Preparation of Pancreatic Extracts Containing Insulin (with Best, Macleod et al.). 1922
- The Value of Insulin in the Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, Diabetes and Insulin, Insulin in Blood, Insulin . 1923
- Medical Research and the Discovery of Insulin . 1924
- Diabetes and insulin . 1925
- Silicosis . 1935
- Early work on insulin . 1937
literature
- Charles Wassermann: Insulin: the struggle for a discovery (= Ullstein non-fiction book volume 34769), Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-548-34769-X .
- Thomas Schlich: Banting, Frederick Grant. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 137.
Web links
- Literature by and about Frederick Banting in the catalog of the German National Library
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1923 award ceremony for Frederick Banting (English)
- Biography on nobelprize.org
Notes and individual references
- ↑ Insulin ("Pancrein") was also produced by Nicolae Paulescu in 1916 by processing slaughterhouse waste, but was only patented on April 10, 1922 by the Ministry of Industry and Trade in Romania under patent number 6254. See also the timetable for the history of research .
- ^ Aviation Safety Network Occurrence # 74088
- ↑ Knights and Dames: A – BEC at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
- ↑ The author Charles Wassermann fell ill with diabetes himself as a result of which he also went blind: see full text online PDF, free of charge, 101 pages, 16.7 MB, thesis by Katharina Hilbrand: Charles Wassermann (1924–1978), Leben und Werk , Graz 2013
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Banting, Frederick |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Banting, Frederick Grant (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Canadian medic and Nobel Prize winner |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 14, 1891 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Alliston , Canada |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 21, 1941 |
| Place of death | Newfoundland |