Before 1922, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was a death sentence, especially for kids. Their bodies couldn’t make a hormone called insulin, which lets cells take in sugar from food. Doctors tried starvation diets to slow things down. Most patients still died within a year.
Two Canadian researchers, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, figured out how to extract insulin from cow and pig pancreases. In January 1922 they injected it into a dying 14-year-old patient named Leonard Thompson at a hospital in Toronto. Within hours his blood sugar dropped to normal levels. He lived another 13 years.
Banting and Best knew their discovery would be needed by millions of people. So instead of getting rich from it, they sold the patent to the University of Toronto for one Canadian dollar. They said insulin “belongs to the world.” Today around 9 million people on Earth take insulin every day to stay alive.
