[The discovery of insulin: what really happened 80 years ago]

The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1923 for the discovery of insulin in 1921 was awarded to Frederick G. Banting and John J.R. MacLeod. This choice was highly debated: Banting decided to share his part of the prize with his younger co-worker Charles H. Best, and MacLeod, too, decided to share his part with biochemist James B. Collip. Although previous investigators such as Nicolas C. Paulesco, had obtained some positive results isolating "the internal secretion" of the pancreas, only the group in Toronto succeeded in proving consistently the efficacy of their insulin extracts. Banting had the idea of isolating insulin after reading an article in a medical journal. He received support for his proposed research at the University of Toronto, under the direction of John J.R. MacLeod and was assisted by Charles H. Best, a medical student. Banting's and Best's initial experiments were not definitive, but their apparently favorable results encouraged greater efforts that, with the important contribution of biochemist James B. Collip who has hardly ever been associated with this event, culminated in the discovery of insulin.