Banting and Best
When you make a list of dynamic duos who have changed the world, a few names might come to mind.
Pierre and Marie Curie discovered two new elements together, explained what radioactivity was, and shaped the field of nuclear physics for the next century. Orville and Wilbur Wright used their knowledge of bicycles to create the first machine that could take off from the ground and fly on its own power. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple computer.
A duo you might not recognize—but maybe should—is Banting and Best.
Before their contribution to the world, type 1 diabetes was pretty much a death sentence. Patients were often put on starvation diets, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but this would only temporarily stave off the inevitable.
After Banting and Best, tens of millions of people lived much fuller, longer lives by taking insulin every day.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys the cells in your pancreas that produce insulin.
The job of insulin in the body is to regulate how much sugar is in your bloodstream at a given time. When you eat carbohydrates, your digestive system extracts the glucose (blood sugar) from the food you eat. Glucose circulates around your body by way of your bloodstream.
Glucose is… um, important.
How important? Well, it’s the preferred fuel for most of your body's cells. Your muscles burn glucose when they move around, and your brain needs a constant supply of the stuff in order to think or remember things. And, your vital organs use glucose in order to function properly.
In short, glucose is the fuel that powers your body’s systems, including your CPU.
Not having enough of the stuff is called hypoglycemia. You can get lightheaded or even confused or shaky, ultimately losing consciousness because your systems just can’t function if you’re short on glucose.
On the flip side, having too much of it means your kidneys will work overtime trying to filter all that extra glucose out of your bloodstream. Your vision can get blurry and your brain can get foggy. Over enough time, your blood vessels can be damaged by all that glucose passing through, and this can lead to heart disease, strokes, and more.
Our hero, insulin, plays its part by making sure there’s neither too much nor too little glucose in there.
Your pancreas produces insulin, and when it gets out of whack, you need a little help. Sometimes a lifestyle change is enough, like eating a Mediterranean diet and going for a 30 minute walk every day. Other times, what’s needed is more insulin from the outside.
That’s where Banting and Best step back into our story.
In spite of his youth, Frederick Banting was a very experienced young surgeon—thanks to the onset of World War I and the demand for surgeons he had just gotten a great deal of experience very quickly. By 1920, he was thinking around the clock about the pancreas.
Banting thought there might be a way to extract insulin from the pancreas, even though all previous attempts had failed. That’s because the digestive enzymes produced by the exocrine cells would break down the insulin before it could be isolated.
By tying off the pancreatic ducts, which excreted digestive juices, it might just be possible to get the insulin out of the body without having it break down into a useless state.
While Banting was a surgeon, Charles Best was a scientist. He knew lab protocols well, and he was particularly meticulous and methodical. Best made sure that experimental protocols were carefully followed.
The pair set out to test their theory on dogs. This part of the story isn’t fun for me to tell, but this led to a tremendous amount of real data. Best carefully measured blood sugar levels throughout the process, and early results were promising: after extracting insulin from the pancreas, the dogs given the insulin had lower blood sugar!
Best’s diligence took center stage as the pair worked to improve extraction and purification techniques, refining the process through experiments and guided by data the entire time.
Banting and Best weren’t alone in their pursuit. Frederick Banting eventually shared the Nobel Prize (at only 32 years old!) for medicine with John Macleod, his advisor who had provided the lab space for these experiments and offered some initial guidance. However, Banting was livid that Best was left out of the prize, and shared half of his winnings with him.
For Macleod’s part, he also split his prize money with James Collip, a biochemist who dramatically improved insulin purification for human use. This was certainly a team effort, but in looking back today, it seems fairly unjust not to give Charles Best a big slice of the credit.
Before Banting and Best, the most anyone with type 1 diabetes could hope for was to prolong the inevitable with starvation diets that led to severe malnutrition. After the duo’s work, insulin transformed it into a manageable chronic condition.
It’s safe to say that millions of lives have been saved, and tens of millions of people have lived with a much higher quality of life.
Last thing for today: thanks to
subscriber and fellow author for suggesting these two as a great topic. I really appreciate your comments!
Wonderful.
Interesting way to spell diabeetus.