Charles Best

But we have to pause and acknowledge the sheer gravity of what happened in 1921 at the University of Toronto.

Because Frederick Banting, a surgeon, and Charles Best, who was just a medical student, they basically figured out how to extract insulin from a dog's pancreas.

It was a monumental breakthrough.

Yeah, they purified this crude extract and injected it into a 14-year-old boy, Leonard Thompson, who was slipping into a diabetic coma and was literally days away from death.

In 1890, the German scientists von Mering and Minkowski demonstrated that removing a dog's pancreas caused it to develop all the signs of diabetes, thus establishing the organ's central role in the disease.

But the exact mechanism by which this occurred remained a mystery until 1920, when a young Canadian surgeon named Frederick Banting and his student, Charles Best, advanced the findings of their German colleagues.

Working under Professor MacLeod at the University of Toronto, they confirmed that the pancreas was responsible for regulating blood glucose, successfully treating diabetic dogs by injecting them with an extract they had prepared from pancreas tissue.

By 1922, the researchers working with biochemist James Collip were able to develop a similar extract from beef pancreas to first treat a 14-year-old diabetic boy, followed by six additional patients.

He took this idea to J.J.R. McLeod, a physiology professor at the University of Toronto, who somewhat reluctantly gave him lab space, dogs, and a student assistant for the summer of 1921.

That assistant was 22-year-old Charles Best, who reportedly got the job on a coin tosser.

By that fall, they were keeping diabetic dogs alive with pancreatic extract.

One famous dog, Marjorie, survived about 70 days.

Within about a year, Eli Lilly was mass-producing it.

In 1923, Banting and McLeod won the Nobel Prize, and Banting, at 32, is still the youngest Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine.

He was furious that Best was left out and actually split his prize money with him.

McLeod split his with Collin.

Today, Eli Lillian Company is the highest earning pharmaceutical company in the world and reported income in 2025 was $65.2 billion with a B, with a projected revenue in 2026 to exceed $83 billion.

yep and in 19 so in the in 1921 a discovery is made at the university of toronto by dr frederick manting and um i believe it's dr charles best and this is my alma mater i'm from i went to u of t for four years oh you went

to indoor school of trucking

that was after um anyway That's your

master rig degree.

Yeah.

So Charles Best and Banting discover in Frederick, Sir Frederick Banting discover insulin in early 1921.

And this is one of the most important medical discoveries ever.