Author: medkth

‘Game of Thrones’…with lab coats and pipettes instead of poisoned daggers and chain mail…

…is a pretty good description of the story of the discovery of insulin. This week has seen much celebration of the fact that one hundred years ago on 11th Jan, this life saving substance, isolated by Fred Banting, Charles Best, John Macleod and James Collip at the University of Toronto was first injected into a human patient. But spare a thought for poor German scientist Georg Zuelzer who would be spinning in his grave had he known we were celebrating the centenary of insulin this year.

As far as Zuelzer was concerned he had already isolated insulin, patented it and tested it with some degree of success in patients back in 1908. And when Banting was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin, Zuelzer was utterly dismayed.

So why then don’t we remember Zuelzer? In a piece for ‘The Conversation’ this week, I take a look at this question…https://theconversation.com/the-discovery-of-insulin-a-story-of-monstrous-egos-and-toxic-rivalries-172820

100 years ago today – a medical milestone – or was it…?

100 years ago today saw Canadian scientist Fred Banting hoping to secure his place in medical history with the first ever injection of insulin into a human patient. But the result was disappointing. When he published the work, Banting said that ‘no clinical benefit was evidenced’. Yet only a year later, Banting had received the most prestigious accolade in science – the Nobel Prize – for this medical milestone. How come? What had changed? In a recent interview on BBC 5Live Naked Scientists podcast I explained why…