00:00:07
[Music]
00:00:21
you
00:00:25
people who came down with it usually
00:00:29
children quickly lost weight they shrunk
00:00:32
away and died within months the onset of
00:00:37
it was in effect a death sentence the
00:00:42
only therapy if you could call it
00:00:43
therapy was to put them on horrible
00:00:46
diets the undernutrition diet was in
00:00:53
fact slowly starving to death
00:00:55
[Music]
00:00:58
have to remember that this is in the
00:01:00
1920s there are no medicines this is a
00:01:03
medicine that takes children who are
00:01:06
going to die in weeks or months and
00:01:08
saves their lives this was just an
00:01:10
absolute miracle
00:01:11
[Music]
00:01:14
you
00:01:29
[Music]
00:01:38
[Music]
00:01:44
the name panting is synonymous with best
00:01:48
you mentioned the names banty and best
00:01:51
to a Canadian well of course it's a
00:01:54
discovery of insulin Frederick G Banting
00:01:58
and Charles H best are two of Canada's
00:02:00
most celebrated national heroes and the
00:02:03
lead characters in a scientific origin
00:02:06
story that has undeniable appeal to
00:02:09
underdogs who came out of nowhere and
00:02:11
cured one of the world's most dreadful
00:02:14
diseases the discovery of insulin is
00:02:16
seen as as CAD as gift to the world and
00:02:20
it started right here in this house all
00:02:22
those years ago
00:02:27
so this is the most important rumor
00:02:28
house this is the the Banting bed and I
00:02:31
was here the world changed October 31st
00:02:33
1920 when bandy comes up with his idea
00:02:36
we let people come in and experience the
00:02:39
room because it's that important and we
00:02:41
do let people sit on the bed one time we
00:02:43
had this gentleman he'd been doing
00:02:45
diabetes research for over 30 years he
00:02:47
comes in and next thing I know he's
00:02:49
laying down and then he says to me I'm
00:02:51
so sorry but you'll never know what this
00:02:53
means to me this is the site of the
00:02:55
greatest moment in my field I knew I had
00:02:57
to come here and pay my respects and
00:02:59
that's why you hear words like
00:03:00
pilgrimage when people come here
00:03:03
Banting he actually failed this first
00:03:05
year University oh he becomes most
00:03:08
famous physicians / scientists in the
00:03:10
world one of his former teachers was
00:03:12
quoted in a newspaper Frederick Banting
00:03:14
not a student on whom you thought Fame
00:03:16
would ever settle it's actually a pretty
00:03:21
great story the idea is October 31st
00:03:24
1920 here's the basis of my idea we know
00:03:28
that if you remove or destroy the
00:03:29
pancreas the amount of sugar in the
00:03:31
bloodstream goes shooting up and have
00:03:32
you got too much sugar in the blood
00:03:33
you've got diabetes so of course
00:03:35
therefore there must be something some
00:03:39
internal secretion in the pancreas which
00:03:40
controls the amount of sugar in the
00:03:42
profit if I could find my do you see
00:03:43
there must be an intense well it's all
00:03:45
this at least that's what I want to try
00:03:48
and prove your first experiment is May
00:03:51
17 1921 I've done this properly you can
00:03:56
see a nice dried-up pancreas with all
00:03:58
the S&S tissues withered away July 30th
00:04:02
is that famous Banting best in the dog
00:04:04
photograph
00:04:06
his dog for 10 cc's of extract given at
00:04:11
12 midnight
00:04:13
there's no more doubt China eight hours
00:04:16
ago a diabetic target look at there now
00:04:18
it's that singular event that two am
00:04:21
event that said in motion this chain of
00:04:23
events that led to the discovery of
00:04:24
insulin when it did we've done it
00:04:26
charlie
00:04:28
we've got it
00:04:30
[Music]
00:04:32
[Laughter]
00:04:39
there were people who said that you you
00:04:42
can't write the true story of the
00:04:45
discovery of insulin in the 1970s
00:04:48
Michael bliss was a young historian at
00:04:50
the University of Toronto with a Banting
00:04:52
and best legend loomed large I would
00:04:55
walk across our campus and look at the
00:04:57
monuments this was where the two
00:04:59
scientists had made their big discovery
00:05:01
but it wasn't hard to find holes in the
00:05:03
story if you said to yourself Nobel
00:05:06
Prize for insulin Nobel Prize to banning
00:05:09
and best oh no that's not quite right
00:05:11
the Nobel Prize was awarded to Banting
00:05:15
and some guy named MacLeod bliss decided
00:05:20
to keep digging he pored through
00:05:22
thousands of old documents interviewed
00:05:24
surviving patients and meticulously
00:05:26
pieced together a record of Banting and
00:05:28
best original experiments the story he
00:05:31
found was a messy one embellished
00:05:34
results bitter personal rivalries and
00:05:36
important contributors who'd been almost
00:05:38
completely forgotten and Banting's
00:05:41
famous ideas it turned out wasn't a
00:05:43
breakthrough at all very early on I was
00:05:46
approached by a doctor who had been a
00:05:49
student under banning he said the story
00:05:52
of banning invest is a great and
00:05:55
wonderful fairy tale professor bliss and
00:05:58
you ought not to cause it to be
00:06:03
shattered all science is an arc
00:06:07
everything we do is built on everything
00:06:10
that came before and there's a whole
00:06:11
branch of treatment as a molecular
00:06:13
geneticist at Rockefeller University
00:06:15
among scientists he's famous for his own
00:06:18
discovery of a hormone called leptin
00:06:21
he's fascinated by how scientific
00:06:23
discoveries build on one another which
00:06:26
is what drew him to the insulin story
00:06:27
there were lots of sort of clinical
00:06:29
milestones along the way but the first
00:06:33
real breakthrough I think this was in
00:06:35
1888 or 89 and 1889 researchers in
00:06:39
Germany oskar Minkowski and Josef
00:06:41
thought marrying mikowski was one of the
00:06:43
great
00:06:44
animal surgeons of his day they found
00:06:46
that if you took the pancreas out of
00:06:49
dogs they immediately became diabetic
00:06:52
diabetes mellitus which is what we're
00:06:55
talking about means sweet urine the
00:06:56
folklore is that physicians of the day
00:06:59
would taste the urine I'm not actually
00:07:01
sure exactly how Minkowski decided there
00:07:04
was sugar in the urine but he did that
00:07:09
was the point at which it was clear that
00:07:11
the pancreas had something to do with
00:07:13
diabetes the next piece of the puzzle
00:07:16
came from a medical student at Johns
00:07:18
Hopkins University Eugene Opie did a
00:07:20
really lovely set of experiments where
00:07:23
he could show that it wasn't the
00:07:24
pancreas itself that was causing
00:07:26
diabetes it was a particular structure
00:07:29
within it
00:07:30
most of the pancreas is made up of cells
00:07:32
that produce digestive enzymes and then
00:07:35
there's these small structures the
00:07:37
islets of langerhans they only make up
00:07:39
about one or two percent of the pancreas
00:07:41
and before OB they were a complete
00:07:43
mystery
00:07:44
what Opie showed is that if you
00:07:46
developed a disorder of the pancreas and
00:07:49
the islets of langerhans were preserved
00:07:51
you didn't have diabetes but if the
00:07:53
islets of langerhans were destroyed you
00:07:55
did so then the question is what are the
00:07:58
islets of langerhans doing and there
00:08:00
were lots of theories abound one of them
00:08:02
of course was that they make some factor
00:08:04
some kind of substance what came to be
00:08:07
called the internal secretion of the
00:08:09
pancreas and controls blood glucose and
00:08:12
lots of people hundreds of scientists
00:08:14
started to look for that factor but
00:08:17
nobody was able to find it but that
00:08:20
didn't stop doctors and scientists all
00:08:21
over the world from trying to turn the
00:08:23
pancreas into a medicine you would feed
00:08:26
patients raw pancreas or a ground-up
00:08:30
extract of the pancreas
00:08:32
but anybody who had some good results
00:08:35
found that terrible things were also
00:08:38
happening to the patients vomiting fever
00:08:41
convulsions injections of pancreatic
00:08:43
preparations that proved both useless
00:08:45
and harmful in fact some people are
00:08:48
suggesting the whole hypothesis must be
00:08:50
wrong
00:08:57
banning was the first to admit that his
00:08:59
education wasn't very good but he was
00:09:02
intellectually curious one night when he
00:09:05
was having to give a lecture on the
00:09:06
pancreas he was reading in the
00:09:08
literature and got struck by an article
00:09:11
on blockages of pancreatic ducts it
00:09:14
inspired him to write down an idea and
00:09:17
banning thought maybe this idea would
00:09:19
work as a cure for diabetes October 31st
00:09:23
1920 like eight pink romantic thought
00:09:26
that maybe the digestive juices in the
00:09:27
pancreas were destroying the internal
00:09:30
secretion Banting's idea was maybe we
00:09:32
could like ate the pancreatic duct if we
00:09:35
block the pancreatic duct the pancreatic
00:09:38
juices dry up - the only structure left
00:09:40
of the islets of langerhans and voila
00:09:43
we'll have the internal secretion
00:09:46
[Music]
00:09:49
Banting took his idea to the University
00:09:52
of Toronto Banting's alma mater and one
00:09:54
of the top public research universities
00:09:56
of its time it's here he met jjr MacLeod
00:10:00
a Scottish physiologist who was a
00:10:02
leading expert on diabetes MacLeod was
00:10:05
skeptical doubted that Manning's idea
00:10:08
was practical or even particularly
00:10:10
original but he had some extra lab space
00:10:13
over the summer so he gave Banting a
00:10:15
shot he even offered to hire a graduate
00:10:17
student named Charles best to help
00:10:20
Banting and best begin their research on
00:10:24
May 17 1921 and then MacLeod goes to
00:10:28
Scotland for the summer so Banting and
00:10:31
best were on their own doing operations
00:10:34
on dogs in 90-degree heat things had a
00:10:37
way of going wrong dogs getting infected
00:10:40
in the heat running short of dogs having
00:10:43
to go out on the street and buy dogs
00:10:47
people talk about the dog Margery as the
00:10:50
first dog that's a later invention in
00:10:54
fact the Toronto dogs all had numbers
00:10:58
[Music]
00:11:04
lots of dogs lost their lives
00:11:12
it sounds horrifying and in a way it was
00:11:15
it was a tough tough piece of research
00:11:19
by the end of July though they found
00:11:22
that they could make an extract of the
00:11:26
pancreas of these duct ligated dogs and
00:11:28
if they injected it into the diabetic
00:11:30
dogs the blood sugar would drop and that
00:11:33
was for banning and best really exciting
00:11:36
stuff dear professor MacLeod I have so
00:11:39
much to tell you and ask you about that
00:11:41
I scarcely know where to begin
00:11:42
there Banting MacLeod comes back the
00:11:45
results from your experiments are
00:11:47
certainly very encouraging but he's
00:11:50
skeptical it's very easy in saint's to
00:11:53
satisfy one's own self but very hard to
00:11:55
build up a strong world of proof which
00:11:57
others cannot we'll moon their research
00:12:00
was riddled with errors
00:12:04
[Music]
00:12:07
they ignored negative results they
00:12:11
utterly misread results the results on
00:12:15
dog 408 were not absolutely convincing
00:12:17
MacLeod and banning had very sharp
00:12:20
confrontations about how much support
00:12:23
MacLeod would give to the ongoing
00:12:25
research I asked him affording immense
00:12:27
tension and bitterness the Festiva cloud
00:12:30
was not inclined to give us these
00:12:32
demands under the surface a dinner wish
00:12:34
to spend money at present on the old
00:12:36
rules vanam Center MacLeod if the
00:12:39
University of Toronto who did not think
00:12:40
that the results were of sufficient
00:12:42
importance I would have to go someplace
00:12:43
where they would his reply was dr.
00:12:46
banning as far as you're concerned as
00:12:48
far as you're concerned I am I am the
00:12:51
University of Toronto best remember Dan
00:12:54
and coming out of that meeting saying
00:12:57
I'll show the little son of a [ __ ]
00:13:00
[Music]
00:13:01
but McLeod actually had good reason to
00:13:04
be skeptical Banting and best hadn't
00:13:07
really gotten much further than earlier
00:13:09
scientists in their published papers
00:13:12
they fudge it a lot but you see in the
00:13:15
notebooks
00:13:17
it just would not work consistently by
00:13:22
December 1921 they were virtually at an
00:13:26
impasse
00:13:28
and so Fanning went to McLeod and said
00:13:31
you know I think we should have help
00:13:35
floating around the university all that
00:13:38
year had been a trained and skilled
00:13:41
biochemist james b column collip joined
00:13:45
the team in december 1921 he and Banting
00:13:48
started out as friends but their
00:13:50
relationship quickly soured as collip
00:13:52
started making rapid progress on his own
00:13:55
call up took banning and best crude
00:13:59
extract and developed a method of
00:14:03
purifying it the real p is immediate
00:14:08
chilling of the pancreas to stop enzyme
00:14:10
action and what was called fractionation
00:14:14
that a biochemist might call him well
00:14:17
understood Banting's idea turned out to
00:14:20
be superfluous because collip just
00:14:23
ground up the whole pancreas by january
00:14:25
there was talk of testing it on a human
00:14:29
banding was thinking i want to be sure
00:14:32
that i get full credit for everything
00:14:35
I've done
00:14:36
so banning insisted that the first
00:14:39
extract to be tried on a human would be
00:14:41
the extract he and best were making on
00:14:43
January 11th they gave Banting and best
00:14:46
extract to a fourteen-year-old boy named
00:14:48
Leonard Thompson and it failed
00:14:51
[Music]
00:14:53
but in the days after the failed test
00:14:55
call it perfected his own purification
00:14:58
method call up went into the lab and
00:15:01
said to banning I've got it and banning
00:15:03
said to call up how did you do it and
00:15:05
call up said I don't think I should tell
00:15:08
you that led to banning grabbing call up
00:15:12
shaking him best having to pull them
00:15:15
apart 12 days later this boy is given
00:15:21
another pancreatic extract and it works
00:15:24
sensationally all the symptoms of his
00:15:27
diabetes are cleared up collip produced
00:15:33
for the first time in history a mixture
00:15:36
of the internal secretion of the
00:15:38
pancreas that proved itself in human
00:15:41
tests something amazing has happened by
00:15:46
any standard of the medicine but the
00:15:50
production problem was a nightmare
00:15:53
they had desperate parents flocking to
00:15:56
Toronto to look for this magic discovery
00:15:58
and they didn't have it they had to get
00:16:01
help Eli Lilly and Company big American
00:16:04
drug company begins pouring its
00:16:06
resources into the problem of making
00:16:09
insulin the science was yet to be
00:16:12
discovered in fact it takes us almost
00:16:14
the entire first year to invent the
00:16:17
actual process they understood and every
00:16:20
day there was a delay
00:16:22
you know patients died by the summer of
00:16:26
1922 Lilly is able to produce potent
00:16:30
insulin and we have astonishing results
00:16:42
that you could give this to these
00:16:45
children and bring them back to life it
00:16:48
doesn't get any better than that
00:16:51
[Music]
00:17:11
everybody realized this was an amazing
00:17:14
scientific achievement so who had done
00:17:17
it who do you credit with discovering
00:17:21
insulin so the Nobel Prize was formally
00:17:26
awarded to jjr MacLeod and Frederick G
00:17:29
banning Banting was furious he announced
00:17:34
that he was sharing his half of fries
00:17:36
equally with best MacLeod announced that
00:17:40
he was sharing his half of the Nobel
00:17:43
Prize with [ __ ] but the banning and best
00:17:47
version these brilliant genius is
00:17:51
working with everybody's hand turned
00:17:52
against me this resonated with the
00:17:54
public there was dr. banning a man who
00:18:00
had the idea
00:18:02
surely the idea is everything and so
00:18:08
banding really was put on a pedestal I
00:18:17
don't think there's any question that
00:18:19
eventually someone would have purified
00:18:21
insulin and made it into a medicine the
00:18:23
truth is in most of science there's not
00:18:26
a single step there's a series of steps
00:18:28
knowledge advances and then all of a
00:18:30
sudden one group builds on what came
00:18:32
before and just makes the big advance
00:18:35
the people who get to make the advance
00:18:39
often had better fortune or were in
00:18:41
better circumstances than the people who
00:18:43
didn't who might very well have been
00:18:45
able to have they begin
00:18:46
equivalent chance there's perhaps no
00:18:49
better example of this than an American
00:18:52
scientist named Israel kleiner who
00:18:54
published this paper less than two years
00:18:56
before Banting and best started their
00:18:58
research a paper that I think is just a
00:19:01
masterpiece he comes up with what by
00:19:04
today's standards would be a completely
00:19:06
statistically significant dataset
00:19:08
he shows definitively that the pancreas
00:19:10
makes a factor that controls blood
00:19:14
glucose I think it's pretty clear that
00:19:15
kleiner was describing insulin he didn't
00:19:18
call it insulin at the time finer
00:19:21
understood exactly what he had he knew
00:19:24
what this factor was he knew it at
00:19:26
therapeutic implications and even
00:19:28
contemplated how this could potentially
00:19:30
be made into a treatment but it was
00:19:33
something that kleiner never attempted
00:19:35
and this is where his story takes a
00:19:37
sharp turn away from Banting's Kleiner's
00:19:40
research came to an end in 1919 when the
00:19:44
lab where he was working shut down he
00:19:46
has a wife a young daughter
00:19:48
he's also supporting his mother-in-law
00:19:50
because his two brother-in-law's had
00:19:52
been killed in World War one and the
00:19:55
only job he can find is is the New York
00:19:58
homeopathic college which is rather
00:20:01
antithetical to his research training in
00:20:03
his scientific background at that point
00:20:06
in time there are very few places in the
00:20:09
world in the provide the funding to do
00:20:11
research Banting was lucky enough to be
00:20:14
at one of those places and he had one
00:20:17
other thing going for him one of the
00:20:19
things that bothers me a little bit
00:20:21
about kleiner he clearly understood what
00:20:24
needed to be done on the other hand
00:20:25
there's no evidence that it was at the
00:20:26
top of his priority list either and that
00:20:29
does contrast to Banting who was
00:20:31
absolutely obsessed with purifying this
00:20:34
and making unit 2 a treatment
00:20:39
banning and best one the Battle of
00:20:41
history in the popular mind there is
00:20:45
tremendous staying power of the Banting
00:20:48
and best myth it's so easy to say
00:20:52
Banting and best and so confusing to say
00:20:55
banning best call it MacLeod collip was
00:20:59
the best scientist of the bunch within
00:21:02
two years he was one of the key
00:21:04
discoverers of parathyroid hormone in
00:21:07
the late 1920s he began work on the
00:21:10
estrogens call up students got Nobel
00:21:14
Prizes for their work on the hormones of
00:21:16
the brain without MacLeod and collip
00:21:20
banning and best research on convinced
00:21:23
would have petered out in nothing
00:21:27
particularly useful banning and best
00:21:30
would have disappeared into the mists of
00:21:32
failed ideas banning never really
00:21:38
understood limitations of his idea
00:21:41
banning always believed his whole life
00:21:45
had been in effect based on this one
00:21:48
idea that had come to him late in the
00:21:51
night you can see in his later research
00:21:53
banning is always trying to find other
00:21:55
great ideas so he can do it again but he
00:22:00
never did
00:22:14
[Music]
00:22:27
we want heroes that we can emulate we
00:22:34
want heroes who can be mentors to us and
00:22:40
it's tougher to say well look you know
00:22:44
the reality is different it's not a
00:22:52
story about Banting not about best but a
00:22:55
story about what insulin did for these
00:22:57
diabetic patients the more you think
00:23:03
about it in a way the bigger the
00:23:06
breakthrough becomes
00:23:09
my cell phone in Seoul here is science
00:23:19
[Music]
00:23:20
finding it a way to alter the human
00:23:23
condition
00:23:24
[Music]
00:23:47
you
00:24:01
you
00:24:02
[Music]
00:24:13
you
