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Imagine this: Your child is in a coma, lying in a hospital ward with several other comatose children. All of them are dying, expected to never wake up. Then three doctors come in and start injecting all the children with a new drug. Suddenly, before the physicians finish treating all the young patients, the first kids to receive the drug begin to wake up.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 11, 1922-
Diabetes was a death sentence. Prior to the discovery of insulin, once a person was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which usually happened in childhood, they had maybe a year or two to live. But a Canadian physician was determined to change that.
Frederick Banting was born in the province of Ontario in 1891. In 1910 he began a general arts program at the University of Toronto, and they failed his ass. But he said no wait please can I be a doctor instead? And they were all yeah sure I guess, and in 1912 he was accepted into their medical school.
Ten years later, he changed the world.
After serving with distinction as a doctor in World War I, he then returned to Toronto to complete his surgical training. He became interested in diabetes after reading an article about the pancreas. He delved into the research, trying to solve the problem of extracting insulin from a pancreas to treat diabetes without destroying the organ during the extraction. How he and his lab assistant Charles Best eventually isolated it was complicated medical shit you can google if you are of a mind.
On January 11, 1922, a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson lay dying from Type 1 diabetes. Banting and Best tested their insulin extract—taken from the pancreas of an ox—on the boy, but it was full of impurities and Thompson suffered a severe allergic reaction. They cancelled further treatment, and biochemist James Collip worked diligently to purify the insulin extract over the next several days. Physiology professor J.J.R. Macleod, whose lab was used for the experiments, also helped with the process.
A second, purified dose was injected into Thompson on January 23, with amazing results. The following year Banting and Macleod were awarded a Nobel Prize. Banting shared his winnings with Best, and Macleod subsequently shared his with Collip. They sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto.
The price? One dollar.
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They sold the patent for $1! That's beautiful. Not like the shithead that raised the prices to exorbitant numbers. It's nice to know there were people that worked on it for good reasons. Do they, University of Toronto, still have the patent or did they sell it; do you know?
I love this story! Thanks so much!
Countless lives have been saved because of them! They're true heroes! 💞
Now, if only fucking greedy big pharma execs didn't exist..... 🙄😒