Almost famous: E. Clark Noble, the common thread in the discovery of insulin and vinblastine

Clark Noble was one of the first members of the University of Toronto insulin team and came within a coin toss of replacing Charles Best as Frederick Banting's assistant during the summer of 1921. Noble performed important early studies helping to characterize insulin's action, and he co-authored many of the original papers describing insulin. Because mass production of insulin from livestock pancreata had proved elusive throughout 1922, J.J.R. Macleod hired Noble during the summer of 1923 to help him test and develop a new method for producing commercial quantities of insulin that Macleod believed would revolutionize insulin production. However, commercial production of insulin from fish proved impractical and was dropped by 1924, as methods to produce large quantities of mammalian insulin had improved very rapidly. Noble later played a small but critical role in the most important Canadian contribution to cancer chemotherapy research: the discovery of vinca alkaloids by his brother Robert Laing Noble. Although one might expect that a physician involved in 2 of Canada's most important medical discoveries during the 20th century must be famous, such was not Clark Noble's fate. He died without so much as an obituary in CMAJ.