Insulin: The Holy Grail of Medicine

The most dramatic story in Canadian medicine had an inauspicious beginning. A shy part-time instructor at the University of Western’s medical school, Frederick Banting, came to visit the august professor of physiology J.J.R. Macleod in his office at the University of Toronto. A skeptical Macleod listened to the shy and hesitant Banting describe how an idea had come to him, one sleepless night, of how isolating a secretion in the pancreas might hold the key to curing diabetes.

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